Wedding Party: Bridesmaid Brooke

Making friends wherever she goes.

Brooke was, I believe, within the first three or four people Bry and I talked to at HSU. We ended up in the same FIG (Freshmen Interest Group) for lovers of languages and took English 100, Ethnic Studies, and the Marching Lumberjacks together in our first semester.

We go back a long ways. This picture is from a band trip in 2010.

(We have older pictures of us but it is just plain embarrassing to drag those up. I've since gained some knowledge of fashion and I'd prefer to keep our 2006-2010 pictures in the past.) Brooke was, believe it or not, the person that signed me up for Facebook. I resisted it initially, but clearly she has a vision of the future and could tell way back in 2006 that MySpace was on the way out.  

She even married my sister! (You know what I mean.)

Brooke was the one who corrected our grammar in our first weeks of college (having never encountered a Pennsylvania Dutch variant of English on the East coast.) and introduced us to Dungeons and Dragons. She gave us hand drawn graphic novels for our 18th birthday and more often than not if I have a happy memory from college it has Brooke in it. 

Somehow we made it out.

Shortly into 2013, Brooke told me that she was going to be moving back down to the Bay Area and I feared the worst. We'd never see each other again! We wouldn't be able to play D&D anymore! Would we still be friends??? (All the while, I was planning on moving to China for a year in just a matter of months.) I couldn't think of anything to say. How do you tell someone how much they mean to you and how badly you want to keep them in your life? I told her then and there that I wanted her to be one of my bridesmaids. (Yes, this was February 2013... and Steven proposed September 2014... what of it?) This was the only way for me to convey just how much I wanted her to stick around. 

Here we are two years later.

Brooke has been an amazing friend over the years, and I've enjoyed growing up a bit with her. I look forward to her being an aunt to my future kids, and a partner in old-age debauchery. 

These bitches mean a lot to me, and I'm glad they get to be a part of my wedding.