Brayden was serving a church mission in South Africa when his cousins told me to write him a letter. I was new to Victoria, we hadn’t met yet. They thought we would be cute together, but I wasn’t interested at the time. I was headed to Brussels for the summer where my parents were stationed, and then off to Spain for a study abroad program and couldn’t think about adding anything else to my plate. Eventually (and luckily!) I thought, ‘why not?,’ and decided to write one letter to him. I wrote the return address as my address in Victoria, and promptly moved to Brussels. On June 3, 2015, I got a message from my brother who had picked up my mail. I had received a letter from Brayden on my birthday! It was the funniest thing I had ever read. So, I wrote a new letter to him, but this time with my accurate return address. We wrote letters over the course of 8 months. No facetime or phone calls, only letters and an email once a week. My happiest days were the ones a letter from South Africa appeared in my mailbox.
We both moved back to Victoria, Canada, within a month of each other and were inseparable. We started dating in January, were head over heels for each other by February, and he proposed at the end of April. We were married July 15, 2016, on a warm summer day.
