This is a Lovers Lock. If you’d like to submit your own love story -and maybe have me create a personalized lock that will be added to Toronto’s Lover’s Fence- please read more about submitting here. Of course, you can always go and add your own. Toronto’s Lover’s Fence encloses Grange Park, the park behind the Art Gallery Of Ontario.

Kimmi’s Love Story:

Very basically, we fell in love on line. It was crazy difficult, crazy confusing, and all in all the best thing that could’ve ever happened to me.

Not so basically–

Marie met online through a gay roleplaying site named Sheraton Academy. We talked and roleplayed and just had fun. Then, in July of 2006, I started telling Marie that I loved her, since I did that to all my friends. Except, I loved her more than a friend — I’d fallen for her, and fallen pretty hard, but she lived in Phoenix, I lived in Chicago, and I didn’t really think it would happen. We exchanged poems on Myspace and I fell pretty hard, but because nothing happened, and no one said anything, I let it go.

Sometime in the summer, I kissed my best friend, Alessandra. Nothing happened from it, even though I sort of wanted it to, so when I told Marie one night over AIM, she later told me she was crying and nearly having a panic attack because she didn’t have a chance to tell me that she loved me more than a friend as well, and she was afraid that she’d lost the chace. However, nothing ever happened with Alessandra, but Marie didn’t know that.

In November or so I started sending her some storys that I’d written that had a character of mine looking back and beating himself up because he didn’t say anything to the person he loved because he was afraid and, because he didn’t say anything, he died alone. In early December, I got an email from her that said:

“Okay, I know that telling you this through email is seriously the lamest thing in the world to do, but every single time I try to tell you over the phone I lose my nerve and end up yelling at myself after we hang up. I would prefer to tell you this over the phone and even more prefer to tell you in person, but I can’t make myself do the former and the latter isn’t possible right now and I need to tell you somehow, so email is going to have to do.

I want to start by saying I have felt this way for a few months now but haven’t said anything because we live so far away, in different states and it’s most likely that nothing will come of it, on top of your complicated situation with Alex that I didn’t want to make even more complicated, but with each of the Josselin AU chapters you send me it just beats into me that I’ve got to say something, I have to tell you even if nothing does happen because like the chaos theory says, the tiniest little thing can make a huge crazy change and I’ve done so many things I regret and regret not doing so many things I should have and I don’t want to live like that anymore. Life is way too short and precious to not do or say really important things because you’re scared, and I’m probably going to have another life after this but I don’t want to waste it all fixing the mistakes I made in this one.”

The email went on to say that she’d fallen in love with me and wanted to be my girlfriend even though we lived halfway across the country. I cried the first time I read it, since it echoed exactly what I had hidden in my heart. I ended up flying out to meet her on December 8th, the first time we’d ever met each other. It was amazing, to say shortly. The first night, we slept in the same bed, even though nothing happened that night, my heart wanted to beat out of my chest because I was so nervous even to kiss her fully on the lips.

She flew out to live with me in May of 2008, and we’ve been together since. There’s been some up and downs, and some crazy complicated parents stuff (my folks hate her, but her entire family loves me) but we’ve been living together a full year. And, one day, once it’s legal, I’m planning on marrying her and someday raising kids together and living in a house. We’re going to be together forever, and I know it.

<3 Kimmi and Marie