Because of that tendency I had in high school to read into every little detail, his phone number will forever be etched into my memory.

            "See? Five-two stands for your birthday, three-two-five stands for my birthday, then nine-zero stands for..." my voice trailed off then.

            We could never quite figure out what the nine-zero stood for. During the early months, we feared it stood for "nine months, then no more."

            When we survived the nine months, we hoped it meant "the ninth semester: the beginning of the rest of our lives." After all, we still had eight semesters of college to hurdle.

            And at the age of twenty-five, our ideal age for settling down, we would have been together for nine years. So hopefully, by then, that nine-zero would stand for "nine years of waiting, and now, we wait no more."

            If only people had told us then that nine-zero doesn't necessarily mean anything. That one shouldn't try to find meaning in places where there is really none to be found. That sometimes, you just think things mean something, when in truth, everything is absurd. Everything is meaningless.

            If I had known earlier, I wouldn't have wasted my time hanging on to that nine-zero. I would have seen it for what it was: just two numbers that happened to be together in a phone number.

            A phone number that, despite the years that have gone by, will somehow triumph over my unwillingness to remember and will always have a place in the recesses of my memory.