We can't wait to celebrate!

As the first snow of the season fell on Northeastern’s campus in the fall of 2016, Abby sat in Blackman Auditorium and watched the first musical theatre show of her freshman year. From the front of the auditorium, she laid eyes on Lukas for the first time as he performed “Side by Side by Side.” Just a few weeks later in the same auditorium, Lukas saw Abby for the first time as she performed “Day by Day” in a production of Godspell. Despite having a number of mutual friends through the same theatre club, Abby and Lukas would not officially meet until spring of the following year. That next semester, Lukas was cast as the edgy, tormented lead of Green Day’s American Idiot the Musical. Somehow, the directors of this show saw an ounce of punk-ish energy in Abby’s audition, and she was also cast. She still questions how this happened, maybe some kind of clerical error? Regardless, Abby and Lukas were spending upwards of 12 hours a week together, drawing on middle-school-punk-phase teen angst for the entire semester.

In the first few weeks of getting to know each other, Abby liked the way Lukas would send her pictures of his meals step by step as he cooked. She was amused by his ability to snap into his heroin-addict character’s shoes after arriving to rehearsal late, coming from Bible study. And she knew she loved him when she found him sitting on a bench outside her dorm one morning, enjoying the spring day after she had overslept for their second date by four hours. Of course she wouldn’t tell him this for months. Those early days Lukas spent with Abby revealed a kind, quick-witted goof that he had no choice but to love. The next couple weeks were filled with exploring Boston together in search of the best food, sharing the nostalgia of their favorite Disney channel original movie 'Smart House', and Abby's never ending patience for Lukas's passionate rants about metal subgenres. After only a month, while visiting from New Jersey over the summer, Lukas told Abby he loved her. While he now knows that Abby knew it before he did, he can at least say he said it first. In the next few years, Abby and Lukas stuck close together, going on countless road trips, helping each other move into a handful of apartments, encouraging each other through engineering school and job applications, and even following one of those jobs into a 6 month intercontinental period of their relationship. It was during this time that Lukas knew he would spend his life with Abby, and as the topic came up more and more in their nightly facetime calls, he was confident that she was on the same page.

When Abby’s time abroad was up, they both hopped on planes and flew right past each other, Abby to her family in New England, and Lukas to his in Finland. Loved ones that they hadn’t seen in a long time made Christmas special that year, but Abby and Lukas were counting down the days until they would be back together. As the two weeks of winter break came to a close, Lukas anxiously started his 24 hour journey back to Massachusetts. Two planes, an endless layover, and a 4 hour drive later, Lukas arrived at Abby’s home in Pembroke where she was waiting for him. Reunited after six and a half months, Abby and Lukas were elated to see one another. After exchanging a few gifts, he asked her to join him outside for some air. He reminisced about those early trips to Pembroke from River Vale to see her, and she stared at him under the twinkling Christmas lights. When he got down on one knee, she couldn’t even see the ring through her tears of joy. Abby and Lukas are feeling so ready to start the next chapter of their lives together. After graduating together, after starting new jobs, and after an engagement consisting almost entirely of a pandemic, they have no idea what their life will look like. But they know that they’ll live it how they started, day by day and side by side.