Today is March 29th. It is also Good Friday.

The last time Good Friday fell on March 29th was 2002.

I was a senior in college. Many of our friends had gone home for the holiday weekend but three of my best friends were still on campus: Katie, Neal and Steve. We decided to have a jam packed evening of fun together to make up for the fact that everyone else had ditched us. It was, we all cheesily punned every few minutes, going to be a good Friday.

We wanted to go out to eat but, since we weren’t supposed to be eating meat since it was Lent, we decided to wait to eat dinner until after midnight so we didn’t have to worry about what we ordered. To keep us distracted in the meantime, we went roller skating (at this sketchy place where there were no doors in the stalls in the bathroom which was really weird) and watched When Harry Met Sally (which will become Oh So Relevant later).

By the time it hit midnight and we went to Perkins (the closest restaurant and a time honored Bucknell tradition) we were ravenous. We ate, we laughed, we lingered and, finally, we made our way back to our dorms around on 2 AM. I was exhausted so I bid farewell to my friends at the door of my dorm so that I could go to bed. To my surprise, as I went to shut the door behind me, my friend Steve had followed me in.

Steve had been one of my very best friends since freshman year but our friendship had taken a very complicated turn the few months prior when he’d admitted that he had feelings for me despite the fact that he was dating a girl from back home.

To him, it was complicated. He felt bad for her because her life revolved around him, he didn’t want to hurt her, he kept trying to break up with her without success, he felt that the fact that they’d talked about marriage informally implied a promise he couldn’t break, and so on ad infinity.

To me, it was simple. If you don’t love someone, you shouldn’t be with them. Period. That was my stance as a friend no matter how I personally felt about him.

At this point in the year, we’d talked the situation pretty much to death. I’d reached the point where, frankly, I had already decided to just enjoy the rest of our senior year as the friends we’d always been without letting all this When Harry Met Sally “men and woman can’t be friends without feelings getting in the way” stuff mess it up. So,when he slid into my dorm after me, I was genuinely like, go away, dude, I want to sleep.

But I was too nice to actually say that so I let him follow me into my empty apartment and kept yawning really obviously, hoping he’d take the hint that I was in no mood to help him figure out his messed up relationship right then. After a little small talk, he asked me to the campus formal which I hadn’t been expecting. We’d actually gone to this same formal together twice already both under awkward and weird “Are we here as friends or is this a date?” circumstances but the last time had been while he was with said girlfriend and she hadn’t exactly appreciated his going with me instead of her.

“Won’t your girlfriend mind?” I asked and, to my surprise, he informed me that he’d broken up with her a few hours ago when the rest of us had been getting ready for roller skating. After all these months of drama, he’d just done it, boom, ripped off the band aid  And the air in the room just tightened and, like that, everything changed. There we were, after all this back and forth, after months of what ifs and hypotheticals about what it would be like if both of us were single and suddenly we both were and what did that mean?

Of course, it was well after midnight by the time I accepted his invite to the formal and then kicked him out because, seriously, I was going to bed. And it was a while after that before we had our first official date or kiss but that was really the end of us just being friends and the start of something else.

And, as I write this, it’s eleven years later and Steve’s asleep on the floor of my office, our newborn daughter snoozing in her swing next to him. Why he doesn’t go sleep in a bed or something is a mystery that, even after being married for over 6 years, I can’t claim to understand. But I thought there was something strangely poetic about that fact that Good Friday, March 29th, 2002 was the start of “us” and here we are on Good Friday, March 29th, 2013 having just redefined “us” to include one more (tiny) person.

It was a good Friday. And so is this one.