Jensen House

 The summer of 2022 had such a fun feeling. I was officially preparing for my move to Calgary and Brody's return home in September. The James family had agreed to let me rent out a room in their home, and my grandpa was helping me find my first car.   It was an exciting time of life, but sometimes I would get really sad thinking about how I was moving away from my family. The sadness was just a bit less than the amount of excitement I had about seeing Brody again. We took a trip to Bothell to see family for my mom's birthday, and it is still one of the best weekends of my life to date.  Jill graduated high school in June and went to prom looking so grown up and beautiful We took a trip to Veranda Beach. It was our first one since the pandemic and it was so fun  I was finishing up my Cosmetology and Barbering program and was supposed to graduate in August, so I could get a job hairdressing in Calgary. The program had been full of great highs and lows. The school ...

Remember last year when I saw that doctor that told me that they could remove all of my painful cramping issues with surgery? I was still waiting for a surgery date, and it had been almost a year. One morning, I woke up to a voicemail from the Abbotsford hospital telling me that they had space for me to get my surgery, in two days.  I had been waiting for this moment. All of the pain and unexplained issues, all of the waiting and wondering and it was happening. I would have to take time away from school and work. It was a small procedure, but surgery nonetheless.  It was a day surgery, and Covid had calmed down quite a bit so my mom was able to come in with me. I was starting to get really nervous about having surgery again. The difference between this one and my appendectomy was that I would be home by the end of the day and it wasn't an emergency. The vibes were totally different. I wasn't in active pain and we weren't at risk of anything happening before I could get in. ...

Brody and I hadn't talked for three days, which was the longest we had ever been apart. I had so much I wanted to tell him. I still hadn't told him about how badly Gaston had hurt me, or how badly Hans had hurt me. I wanted him to know since both of those were pretty big things to happen in my life. I hadn't been able to tell him I loved him for three days, it felt like forever. We knew that his new mission president might be strict and not let us talk at all. That would mean we would only be able to talk every once and awhile, and the idea of that made me really sad.  About three days after Brody got to Guyana, I got an email from him. On Mondays, missionaries typically sent out weekly emails to their families and friends. But I got a special email from him that was just sent to me. We had talked about sending each other voice memos instead of written out emails so we could hear each other's voices. Hearing his voice made me cry. I had previously mentioned that I was g...

 When I saw Elder Jensen after the chaos in Idaho, it was in the parking lot of a stadium in Abbotsford. We had arranged to say goodbye before he left for Guyana in a few days. Missionaries have to travel in pairs, so he had swindled an easy going Elder to come chaperone us, but was going to give us some space. I liked that Elder Jensen wanted to talk to me in person and not just over text. He wasn't shy to admit to others that he wanted to say goodbye to me and that he cared for me. This Elder that came with him had caught on to what was going on a little while ago. We were at a basketball game, Elder Jensen walked away and the other Elder came over to me and said, "You love him, don't you?" At the time, I kind of just laughed. Love is a strong word, I didn't know how I felt yet but I know that I had been burnt by jerks a few too many times and had my guard up. Since then, there had been too many moments I couldn't ignore. I had fallen in love with him.  The ...

 What could the "elephant in the room" mean to him? I mean if you were to ask me, it would be that we obviously have feelings for each other. But for him, it could be that obviously we need to stop being so friendly with each other. He could be waiting to enter the Vancouver airport and tell me that he won't be ready for a relationship for a long time and that I needed to back off. This wouldn't be anything I hadn't heard before. I mean men seemed to run from me as fast as they could, for reasons I didn't understand. But if that were the case, I don't know why he would wait another month and a half to tell me that. He and I had gotten friendly but everything was extremely appropriate, with him being a missionary and all. One night, he told me that the highlight of his day was when he got to see me, which I thought was nice and could be interpreted as a dead giveaway that he liked me more than as a friend, but I still had a massive guard up and knew that he...

 I loved talking to Elder Jensen. The problem was that I was really messed up from all the hurt I had experienced. I was convinced that there was no romantic connection between us, like the one I was convinced that I had with Pete. He had convinced me that Calgary was the place to be, and was even going to help me find a place to live. It seemed that he and his family had a lot of connections in the area. Then, the best thing happened. The missionaries have to move every six weeks, sometimes they stay where they are, sometimes they move many hours away, sometimes they just move a city or two over. Currently, Elder Jensen was in Langley/Surrey area. This was considered outside the area that me and my family lived in, over in Abbotsford. But when the transfer calls came in, we were told that Jensen would be moving to Chilliwack, which was in the same Zone as Abbotsford. This meant that his lessons would be in my church building, he was closer to where I lived and it would be a lot ea...