Where else to plot a new course on this grand adventure than where it first began?
In these pages, I learned more about myself and the world around me than I could’ve dared to expect — lessons and experiences that shaped me personally and professionally since my byline last appeared in The Reveille a couple years ago.
Long nights spent putting The Reveille together were the brush that painted canvas of my college experience. There I found lasting friendships and what it meant to be a journalist. But I return to these pages because of that other thing I stumbled upon during those long nights in the Hodges Hall basement.
Love.
Your college days can provide more than a set of skills. If you let them, they can present the greatest of opportunities. Sometimes, if you’re stubborn like me, those days are well over before you capitalize on the opportunity and ask the question spelled out in the first letters of this proposal.
Once, this girl who worked at The Reveille with me told me the only reason she didn’t drop the Marriage and Family class we had together was because she thought I was handsome. We were supposed to learn about what married life was all about. Instead, we were 20-somethings passing notes like grade-schoolers.
Ultimately, her seemingly insignificant decision not to drop a class she didn’t need set off a chain reaction that led to this moment.
Meet Chelsea Brasted. She’s also a journalist — a much better one than me. She met my byline in The Reveille before she met me in person, though, so I’m convinced she was attracted to my intellect first and foremost. That’s definitely a fact, and no, I don’t want to debate its merit.
And I’m asking her…
Right now…
Ring in hand…
You know, the big question…
Marry me?
Evidently, I didn’t pay enough attention in my writing classes because I just hit the target reader with the hammer midway through the story. But really, this question doesn’t belong at the end — it’s just building on the foundation first set in these ink-stained pages. My urge to you, readers not named Chelsea Brasted, is to seize the opportunities in college that can enrich your life beyond the classroom and the office in the years that follow. Maybe love isn’t what you find, but it is the experience we call life and the joy its little things have to offer that are important.
Crossword puzzles at the park, especially the Reveille puzzles that we can actually solve.
Heroic attempts to pretend we’re equally interested in the knuckle-dragging action movies I love so much or the Rom-Coms she insists we watch.
Escapes to foreign lands with apple pie so perfect it makes you want to die right there on the spot if not for the chance that we could come back and enjoy it again, together.
Long periods of silence that only seem to form when we’ve simultaneously lost ourselves in the written word.
Summer trips to the beach that teach a young couple to never, ever, under any circumstances, let their dog drink seawater.
Every day we wake up at each other’s side.
Adventures, all of them. Those adventures leapt to real life from these pages because we chose not to ignore the guiding hand of opportunity. Just say the word, and they can continue forever.