The end. That’s where Sasha and Shaun found their beginning.
As colleagues in different offices of an international non-profit, they first met in a resort restaurant in Chilean Patagonia on December 1, 2009. It was the end of a year at the end of the earth… at the end of a buffet line.
That could have been the end, but she relocated to the New York office, where he worked. One February day in 2011, he decided to take the subway to the end of the line, a bus to the end of its route and a taxi at the end of its shift to watch her play volleyball in Jamaica, Queens. Her last game ended just before he showed up.
A year later and good friends, their first very memorable dance together was at the end of the night of the last-ever dance party at Southpaw in Brooklyn. He called her from the end of a line snaking around the block. She rode the subway from one end to the other end. They snuck in and danced until the lights came on. Within hours of leaving Southpaw, she flew to South Africa.
Around the world, dance floors inched them together. They willed a cover band in Uruguay to end the night with Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Good. They cut rugs in Colombia, twirled in Texas, moved in moonlight in Miami.
But it was the end of a summer night in July 2012 with a New Orleans brass band blowing tunes across lower Manhattan when they talked about feelings that didn’t end at friendship. But at the end of the summer, Shaun’s seven years in New York would end and he would return to California.
With one on each end of the country, it was unclear what could start or end. But on March 14, 2013, at the end of a getaway to Hill Country, they decided it’s now and together. That day marked the end of these “ends” for them, and with a date that equals π, they see it as the start of something that won’t end.