It’s hard to meet someone serious at college. Everyone’s busy,
self-centeredly grinding away at their dreams. So much so that
people tell you to not even try (especially as a freshman).
I was mostly at ease with myself—as a freshman. I had an
excellent skincare routine—it was downright luxuriant, and it
kept me going, through that romantically baren and lonely year.
But we humans hope—we buy lotto tickets to dream on—though we know the awful math. We Gen Z’s seem to have our own unique brand of loneliness, born of covid and Internet-age experience.
My romantic expectations, sophomore year, were low—ok, unmeasurable.
Looking around was depressing. There were socially awkward STEM majors, jocks, frat men (sure the world’s laid-out just for them) and ‘CSOM Bros" (business majors more interested in parlaying my Grandmère’s money than me) and the elusive, emotionally reserved, ‘regular guys.’
But the unexpected can happen. We all know how crowded campus coffee shops are—the students move in and out in tides as noisy as the real, salty ocean. And then there you were, a rumpled, 25-year-old doctoral student—from another world—asking to share my table.
The loudest thing in that room was your sense of stillness. You seemed to be a new and distinct species, and as we talked, you seemed to somehow smooth my anxious edges. After a few meets, the thought, ‘I really like this guy,’ seemed to have its own gravity.
We somehow managed to thread the ‘too busy to care’ dynamic, and as time went by, you helped me channel my absurd, fiery, pastel-painted, first-love, early-twenty girlhood heat into something longer lasting, deep and authentic. Congratulations! It’s been two years.
Separating now, would be like removing the salt from the sea.
.
.
Songs for this:
Playing House by Kudu
So Much Mine by The Story
After Last Night by The Revlons
BLT Merriam Webster word of the day challenge 01/16/25:
Parlay = to use something to get something of greater value.