Why the whale is the whale
A lot of you are probably wondering ‘What is going on with this whale?

It’s a long story (and we won’t be shortening it) about long-distance relationships. As many of you know, we met in our nation’s capitol eight years ago, but only managed to stay in the same place for a few short months before Chuma flitted off to Paris for a summer internship and Monalisa sailed off the waitlist into medical school in Winston Salem. Our relationship has been intercontinental, transatlantic, and cross-border until we found our way to Sacramento.

While Monalisa managed to carry on as a ‘commuter student’ in medical school and Chuma was in DC, everything changed when Chuma took his first post in Djibouti, Djibouti. During all that time, the only thing that has remained constant (besides our love for each other lol) is the need for TRAVEL. Maybe we met on the Adriatic Sea, and the next year on the Nile. It is probably better we have not calculated the miles (or money) we have spent traveling to see each other. When we couldn’t hop on a plane, we sent one another little cards covered in whales and the delightful scrawl of Monalisa’s handwriting. If you ever visited Chuma in Djibouti (the rest of y’all, fake), you would know this tiny country is a famous location for the migration of whale sharks; the only other animal that can boast as many miles traveled as us. So as we thought about how to best symbolize our relationship, there is no better representation.