I sat in the empty conference room and waited. Mostly, I stared out the wall-sized glass windows at the building next door and relived every moment of the last 15 minutes with Pat. Suddenly, somebody opened the door.
"Are you alone in here?" she asked. Her name was M and she was another petite lady, probably mid-thirties, with dark brown hair that fell around her face.
"Yeah," I shrugged. "I'm use to it, I don't have any family around Dallas."
"Oh." she said, as she came in and sat down next to me.
"I read your entry into the contest," she started, rather quietly. "We received thousands. I sat down and started reading it at about midnight, and I was still crying over it when I came in the next morning. I couldn't even tell them what you had written about, I just handed it over to them and told them they had to read it."
I wasn't really sure who "they" were, but I appreciated her telling me that.
"It must have been awful living through that," she added.
"It was," I agreed. "But its okay, there is a purpose in it all. I know that for sure."
She nodded and got up and hugged me. "Thank you for being here today, your story has touched our whole office." And with that, she also left.
I sat for a few more minutes as I waited for somebody to come back and tell me what I was suppose to do next. I kept hearing these excited yells from down the hall, but I still hadn't put it all together. Eventually, R came back and asked me to follow her.
She took me back to the kitchen that we had passed through between the initial interview and the second interview. I had commented when we were walking through that it looked like they were celebrating somebody's birthday because there were balloons and party trays of cookies strung throughout the kitchen. Now, I found out that the party was to celebrate the three winners of the "Overcomers" contest. We all stood around and took pictures with Pat for her website and media coverage, and she gave us each a bouquet of beautiful flowers and a few pieces of jewelry from her personal line. (Per the contest contract, I can't share what either of the other two winners' stories were, but one was a pretty severe bout with cancer and the other was sexual assault resulting in two pregnancies years apart.)
Of course, I had to take a photo with just me and Pat to be sure that I could include in this blog!
Isn't she fabulous?
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