From Crystal's Perspective

Gabriel and I have been in each other’s orbits for a lot longer than we have really known each other. For the most part, we have spent our lives only a few blocks apart and grew up attending the same schools and church for several years. My family moved around the Edinburg-McAllen area for a while before settling in the home they designed on Canton Road in 2000, less than 5 minutes from where Gabriel’s parents built their home in 1994. Gabriel and I have passed each other in the halls at school and likely shouted over each other’s heads to friends across the way more often than we’ve realized. Gabriel spent a decade as an altar boy at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Edinburg, where I attended mass and CCD and received my First Communion before my family switched to Our Lady of Sorrows in McAllen. Growing up, our friend groups overlapped slightly and we can remember seeing each other in school, but we never really shared a conversation.

Although we were physically close for so long, we cultivated different life paths, and I went to Texas A&M University in 2014 while he stayed in Edinburg and began classes at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in 2016. I was practicing rhetoric and reading classical literature while Gabriel was parsing environmental data and theoretical models. I focused on my schooling, traveled often and studied abroad, and Gabriel began working quickly while attending college to build savings and fund his musical interests and hobbies. I lived alone, then with my sister, then with my closest friend, between school dorms, apartments and a duplex until both my sister and I had graduated, and I came home for good in the middle of 2019.

Gabriel had always been here, continuing to nurture connections with a loyal group of friends and making memories beneath hundreds of sunsets over the city that made us both. He was playing his bass, sitting at coffee shops, working on his project car and supporting local shops and artists, living a cozy hometown dream surrounded by people he had always known. When I came back into the valley, the readjustment period was tough for me—I was plagued by a sort of restlessness and a feeling that my journey had somehow ended before I felt truly accomplished; and my college friends were now all flung across different cities, out of reach without travel plans for the foreseeable future. The friends I’d made in high school had likewise started their lives elsewhere, and I felt alone without my sister, Lauren, in the house. I still had connections to friends of friends that Lauren had, and in those circles, I found a solid, reliable group for hangouts and online gaming—Gabriel and his friends.

I was working during the day and spending my evenings chatting and gaming with Gabriel and his friends, where I felt welcomed and appreciated. For the most part, the pandemic was keeping everybody inside and we were generally limited to interacting online while we social-distanced. Initially, Gabriel himself was a little standoffish and difficult to pin down for conversations. He always gave me the impression that he was busy with far more interesting, important things than whatever the rest of us were doing at any given time. I learned a few things about him as months went by: He likes strong coffee and The Strokes. He’s outdoorsy and very active. He has a dog, he's devoted to his parents and he likes tinkering with vehicles. All of his friends really love him; he seems to be the glue that holds them together. Every time they talk about funny memories, he’s the star in the story. In my head, he was the golden boy and the class favorite. An easygoing joker. A carefree spirit.

The first time Gabriel and I met up together without the buffer of our friends, he took me to McDonalds in his old 2000 Jeep TJ in 2020. We had been playing late-night games on a warm weekend, and both expressed interest in getting some junk food. I remember suspiciously eyeing the rickety vehicle-- which shook and sputtered just sitting in park-- while he promised it was safe, and thinking that he had a really cute laugh later when he mixed up James Bond and Gold Bond. Gabriel and I started becoming closer within group outings, preferring to sit side by side at bars and restaurants, sharing our mutual interests in Pokémon, anime, the Arctic Monkeys and Minecraft, among other things. He was truly beginning to feel like a home outside of home for me, which, after coming back to the valley after college, had been a difficult word to define in general. I found I felt safer in his presence. As long as Gabriel was near me, I would be accounted for, and someone would be concerned about my comfort and my feelings. I saw him as a role model in kind, and I admired his work ethic, skills and family-oriented household. I was listening to the music he loved, trying his favorite foods and applying his philosophies to my everyday choices. I started taking my coffee black at home and at diners because he did; I even stopped using fabric softener because he didn’t, and I started to love myself so much more because to him, I am absolutely incredible.

The closer I got to Gabriel, the more enamored I became with his charming balance between silly and serious. I was impressed by how easily and sincerely he could focus on relaxing, but also how determined and thorough he could be about important tasks. I celebrated with him as he claimed enviable career positions through ambition and experience, sang along to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Weezer with him in the car, laughed until my sides hurt at his utterly ridiculous jokes with his friends and wondered at his multifaceted superpowers that made him a leader both at work and in his social circles. He could match my excitement about the things that mattered to me, whether they were music releases or books or clothes, and he granted every little thing I said his full attention and a kind of curiosity that sometimes made me bashful. We were spending all of our free time together and coming up with excuses to meet up for food, errands and projects. I'm sure the truth of our mutual feelings was evident to our friends and family, and I'd later be told that some of our friends had even expected us to start dating way sooner. Through those glittering months as I fell harder for Gabriel, I was so awed by the fact that someone as incredible, hilarious and dreamy as him had always been right here, not even a mile from my childhood home.

On May 17th, 2021, Gabriel asked me to be his girlfriend. He was always a perfect gentleman, treating me at restaurants and carrying my things and shielding me from rain like the Prince Charming in my daydreams. He always remembered what I liked and didn’t like, the perfect temperature to keep his truck at for me, my Starbucks order and my work schedule. He brought me flowers and bottles of wine and he was always so respectful towards my parents. The more I got to know his family, the more I knew he was truly a rarity of a person with an excellent upbringing. Gabriel had always been involved with the church, prioritized his loved ones, understood the value of hard work and lived his life with a slow and methodical appreciation for everything around him—a salve for my restlessness. He made the city I had thought I needed to escape from feel like home again. I wanted to have coffee in the mornings by the window before the dew dried, lie still and listen to the waves and gulls for hours at the beach and read 500-page books from cover to cover in the shade of a tree; I was romanticizing my life the way that I had always wanted to with little effort simply because of Gabriel’s love.

Under the light of a full Capricorn moon on July 21st, 2024, beside the sea, Gabriel asked me to be his forever. He had just had a particularly long day at work for an event, and I figured he would want to call it an early night. I was surprised when he insisted on joining the trip to the beach with my close friends, who were visiting but would soon be returning to their respective cities, and wanted to get together one more time before then. I had no idea he was planning to propose; in fact, the only person who knew that night was Andrew, his best friend and best man. He asked me to walk along the shore with him, and when we were a good distance away from anybody else down the length of the beach, he got down on one knee at the edge of the tide and changed our lives. We walked back hand in hand as he told me not to worry, because he had already gone and asked my parents for their blessing while I was at work days prior. My friends were jumping and cheering for us as we approached. They marveled at the gorgeous rose gold ring on my finger, which Gabriel had selected for me himself. I was overcome with wonder for his dedication and a thrill for what was to come; I felt like I was in a dream.

Now, we will be married on October 11th, 2025, and I’m excited for a future with Gabriel, who is at once a mirror of myself and an example of all of the things I want to be. The way that he cares for me has grown with us, as has my love for him. We remain each other's best friend, closest confidant and number 1 fan. I’m blessed that I stand to learn so much from him, while he nurtures my interests and appreciates my strengths as well. He gives me confidence that all I’ve learned and experienced has been useful to me, as it shaped who I am and brought me to him. Likewise, I treasure his skills that round out the capabilities of our union, his history that has molded him into the man of my dreams and his intuition that I will trust to guide me as well as it has himself. I know that we have our strength of faith in God and all of the love and support of our friends and families, and our life together will be gold-laced and rose-tinted.

This is our story as best as I can tell it short of filling hundreds of pages, and the rest is yet to be written. Thank you for reading. ♥