Cody and I met at Hume Lake Church Camp in 2008. Yep, church camp. lol. I was 16 and he had just turned 17. I had never been to any type of camp before, so I really was just dying to go to one. I heard about Hume Lake, and how much people loved it, so I when sign ups came around, I grabbed a packet and took it home. A few of my friends were going, so I begged and begged my mom to let me go, even though she wasn't all for it because she thought I would be getting hit over the head with a Bible (if you know what I mean.) Anyway, she ended up letting me go. It was a 6 hour drive up to Hume, and little did I know, Cody and I went to the same church, and were even on the same bus out of the 3. Once we got there, we were assigned our cabins, and after we unpacked we had to head back down and wait for chapel to start. I walked down with my friends, and we we waited at least 30 minutes to even be let inside the chapel, so everyone was mingling, getting to know each other, and during that time, I looked around to see everyone who was there, and I spot Cody for the very first time in a light yellow shirt. It was literally one of those typical "OMG who is that," moments. I looked at him and thought "With all of these people here, there's no way we'll even meet, or that he would even like me." And there was no way I was going to go up to him and introduce myself, so I turned back around and joined in on a conversation. Literally one minute later, the guy friends that my girlfriends and I came with, were walking over… with Cody. I'm freaking out, of course. He introduces himself, I shake his hand, and I'm just like "Ugh, he's so cute."

From that day on, we all hung out as a group for the rest of the week. We looked for shooting stars one night by the lake, where Cody laid his jacket out for me to lay on so I could look up to hopefully see my first shooting star...but I had no luck in finding any! This was something we attempted to find every night at camp, but I ever saw one once!

I remember one girl from another church would always come out of nowhere and try to hang out with us because it was incredibly obvious she liked Cody. She looked so much older than me, and I thought she was really pretty, so I for sure thought I had no chance anymore. But to my surprise, as much attention as she tried to grab from Cody, he didn't really give her the time of day. She even ran onto our bus on the last day before we left and wrote her number on Cody's hand. I died when I saw it, but once she left, he licked his finger and rubbed it off. lol
Once we got home, Cody and I hung out with our other friends a few more times until Summer ended, but once school started, which was our senior year, we kind of just went our separate ways for the next 2.5 years.

For these few years, we only saw each other here and there, like at the gym a couple of times, but one kind of huge one was the day after my cousin died, who he actually went to school with. (Small world, right?) He texted me the day he passed, which until that day, I hadn't talked to him in over a year, but he sent me a really nice text saying how sorry he was and asking if I needed anything. There was a memorial service the day after he passed, and a bunch of friends and family were there. Cody was there too, and I remember him coming up to me to give me a hug once it was over.

Then when I was 19, after we had just ended our second year of college, a friend of mine called me and asked if I wanted to go get lunch with him and Cody. In my head I was like, "What in the world? Cody Baray? So random." I went, everything was totally normal, and we had lunch like normal friends. But I still thought he was cute. The day after that, we went the rest of summer hanging out together. It started off as the 3 of us, but then we secretly started hanging out on our own. We started dating, but had no title. Then It was time for Cody to move back to San Diego for school. Luckily, my two best friends also went to school in San Diego (not the same school as Cody, but close to each other,) so I had plenty of reasons to go down to San Diego. Not too long after, on October 21, 2011, Cody asked me to be his girlfriend P.F. Changs with a cake.

So we spent a little over a year of our relationship iChatting (video chat) on the weekdays, and I would try to go down to San Diego what ever weekends that I could, and vise versa. I would have my dad drop me off at the train station, Cody would pick me up once I got to San Diego, then I would go see my two best friends for a while, and then I would go see Cody. After a while, the train got kind of annoying, so I started driving instead. It's not the most ideal way to start out a relationship, and yes, it was very hard, but we dealt with what we were given, and now here we are, 5 years later. I still look back on all of the weekends I would stay in San Diego, or the nights we spent iChatting for 5 hours while trying to do homework at the same time, and those are some of my favorite memories that we have.

Oh, and remember earlier when I said Cody and I were looking for shooting stars back at camp? Well, I saw my first shooting star with him on my 21st birthday…. And ever since that day, I've only ever seen shooting stars while hanging out together. It's actually pretty often that we see the same one and we both freak out and go "did you see that?!" haha.