Miguel Ruiz ’08 is serious about his writing. So when he got serious about Lauren Chapman ’09, he put it in writing.
Though they had met before, they became friends in the spring semester of 2008 in their English class “RoadWrite.” They talked before classes and hung out together on class field trips. Then something happened.
Lauren heard bits of their conversations in stories Miguel read aloud in class. “I’d think to myself, ‘Wait a minute, that sounds like things we talked about,’ ” she says.
In a poem, he wrote about a “flash of red” and described a character as angelic. Lauren, whose hair is red, had her own inner dialogue: “Was he talking about me? I hope he’s talking about me.”
Not to be outdone, Lauren penned an I-just-met-a-boy story about Miguel.
To those classmates who were reading between the lines, tales of field trips to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Disneyland and Hearst Castle told the story of Lauren and Miguel’s courtship. Some students in the class were catching on, but Miguel and Lauren didn’t admit their growing love openly.
Late in the semester, he made his feelings known in a private poem he left on her desk.
After they both graduated, they returned several times to LMU to visit and plan their wedding. On one trip, they ran into the teacher of “RoadWrite,” Professor Gail Wronsky. She told them that she knew something was up, that “we were all waiting for you guys to get together.”
The musings of their secret hearts were joined at Sacred Heart on Aug. 3, 2013.
Call it the essence of romantic literature.