meet my wife.

Ericka and I have been married by proxy ever since freshman year of BYU when Ericka was afraid that I would get married like those stories I would tell her about eighteen-year-olds getting married at BYU, (like there was anything to be scared of.) but we fell in love way before that.

senior prom

We decided to spend our honeymoon in Paris (she's on study abroad through Stanford), and here we are. Today we went on our first date in a long time. I hope you aren't getting creeped out by this extended metaphor...I'll change. Ericka and I are actually the same person. Emicka Erily. (It's weird that I have to explain to you that Ericka was my best friend in high school, and just hope that you know everything that goes along with that. You can just project all of your wonderful feelings about your friends from high school on to our relationship, and you know, it's something like that.)

Today I met her at the Louvre, and she came to my art history class and listened to the lecture, and we actually did a good job of listening to the lecture, and inserting conversation into appropriate walking times, or appropriately boring intervals. It was a very strange but of course wonderful collision of worlds...




After class we went here:




thick and rich hot chocolate, lingering for a pleasant amount of time, talking of high school, and roommates, and old friends, and parents, and sisters, and Paris, and the flat we will buy here, and determining possible ways of becoming incredibly rich. In one of my old journals, and I read a passage I had written about Ericka during my sophomore year of high school, when I began to be friends with Ericka. I said something about how her determination and drive for life matches the intense color of her hair. I have since decided that her motivation and focus far surpass the dramatic color of her hair. Just look at the way she pours and drinks her hot chocolate:




this people, is why she will go far. and why I blog. don't think about it. just look at that interior...yum.

We like drinking things together:



But mostly it was so nice to see my wife again, as our lives have just seemed to expand until the parts where we overlap are shoved to the outsides. But we live in Paris now, and we live closer to each other than we ever have in our entire lives. And even though it can't really not go back to more than living a few states away, and occasional phone calls and seeing each other at christmas and summer, today we walked around in the Louvre, and I told her about going to Place des Vosges and almost crying because it was so beautiful, and she just said, "oh Emma" in such an understanding-of-me way, and we talked about our forthcoming run in the Jardin des Plantes on Friday.