sam & kat are getting married!!

In 2021, Katherine had just finished her first year of law school. She was reading sixty novels a year, tending to her many cosmopolitan & creative outlets–baking, watercolor painting, block printing, international travel, calligraphy, daughter-ing. Sam meanwhile was doddering, having taken to a multi-year nocturnal brood–he flitted through post-pandemic late-twenties life as if in a fog, accruing rewards points at multiple fast casual pizza restaurants, calling movies “films,” dilletanting on a mahogany acoustic, devising competing whiteboard-ed systems for working his way through the interactive canon--all the while pining for the kind of pistol-bookworm dream-gal found only in the most idealistic of early English fiction, the kind of blonde-bombshell which languished boys like him once painted idolatrously on the side of B-2s to keep their spirits high and ensure safe return back to the good ol’ ground. Found, too, in the family trees of close Chicago pal Ashley Sanders, as it were. Screenshotted texts from the era alongside Sam’s lifelong bent of keeping a sturdy log of quips tell us that Kat said things like, “if you’re smart, your leather guy is the same as your shoe guy” and “I will not text you back”; Sam, who had holes in his shoes, said things like “Just one date.” With Kat set to move back to Seattle in six weeks, he just one date’d his way into a series of Art Institute-dinner-bicycle outings which culminated in a trip to Madison, Wisconsin and a surprise birthday tour, for Kat, at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen complex. She caught up, there, to his smitten-ing. Back in Chicago, she smoked him in cards or Scrabble and allowed him the illusion of sous chef-ing her titanic NYT crossword streak, brought him back to the less cerebral sides of life--purchasing clothing, cooking meals, leaving the house, the sculptures of Alexander Calder--while he dragged her to avant garde documentaries about surveillance, followed by crepes, and made her laugh. As the summer ended they biked between the triumvirate of Chicago bookstores (Unabridged, Open Books, Sem Co-op) and swam in the lake. Kat said things like “who knew you could be this happy?” Sam, having beaten her to the punch by about six days, said things like “I did.” For the next twenty months of law school, they talked on the phone three or five or eight times every day and never went more than four weeks without flying 2,064 miles to see each other. Those outside the loop might look to the Long Distance™ project as a difficulty that arises out of uncertainty--what if this doesn’t work?--when in fact the problem is one of total clarity: how best to contort our lives around the thing that has become so obviously more important than quite literally everything else? Four years later--Kat J.D.’d, Sam back on the ground, bookshelves combined in Chicago, labrador adopted, with Paris and Amsterdam and Copenhagen on the books--they look forward to welcoming you to their favorite city, and their favorite life.