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(02/13/19 5:57am)
There’s a button pinned to a cork board in my dining room. It’s somehow managed to stick with me through two cross-country moves and twice as many apartments. A bland, white type-face stares out at me from the requisite red and blue background, loudly proclaiming, “I met my husband at Penn!”
It was picked up years ago as a joke. In a fit of giggles, jaded college friends and I pinned them to our backpacks—an act so painfully designed to be ironic it’s physically uncomfortable to look back on now. “Can you believe these actually exist!?”
I went through the entirety of my undergraduate degree without a single significant relationship. A victim of campus hook-up culture and a steadfast believer that I was just too busy for love. If I said it to enough people it would be true, right?
Throughout the years other buttons came into my possession:
“I met my wife at Penn!” (My heart still fills with joy when I think of my platonically beloved college spouse and go-to party date)
“I met my best friend at Penn!” (Who else would I spend the High Holidays with?)
“Quaker for life!” (lol – but also, I came back for graduate school so that joke’s on me)
But I couldn’t tell you where any of those are now… The only one that’s still pinned to my cork board, two cross-country moves and twice as many apartments later, is THAT goddamn button.
“I met my husband at Penn!”
It caught my eye the other day. I’ll graduate with my master’s degree on the same day as my five-year reunion. And I’m still peddling that age-old excuse… no, no I’m just too busy for a relationship. I might have picked up that pin as a joke, but it’s starting to feel like curse. Either that or I desperately need to examine my own priorities and insecurities while also calling out the toxicity that can exist around developing relationships in a highly competitive environment amid a generation with an increasingly short attention span…. Nah, that fucking pin is cursed.
Well, come all ye loyal classmen now, in hall and campus through… I’ve started to look at Ph.D. applications, and I really don’t need that in my life right now, so help a girl out? Thanks.
(02/13/19 6:14am)
Sometimes, it is hard to make people understand that Sam and I aren’t dating. Part of the problem is that we have before—in high school, for a year or so, on-and-off one too many times. Part of it is that, a la Avril Lavigne, he is a guy and I am a girl, and while we both know how to bitch about heteronormativity and society, we probably don’t do it loudly enough. Probably the biggest issue, though, is that we still love each other. We both feel it. We both know it. And—to the eternal chagrin and confusion of whatever person I’m trying to trick into dating me at the time—we still say it to each other.
I know that it’s weird. We talk about it, sometimes, when it’s just the two of us hanging out, using language we’ve stolen from our combined years of therapy, about emotional labor and reciprocity and so-what-do-you-need-right-now. More often, we joke about it. Or joke around it. I spend a lot of time performing playful hatred for him. Our greetings over text have become, “Hey bitch,” et al. I am constantly making fun of his clothes, his shoes, his experiments in facial hair. I try to especially play it up in front of other people, especially the ones who aren’t quite sure what’s going on—as if to signal, “it’s cool now, it’s funny, it’s chill. We’re chill. Definitely chill.”
I know a good deal about acting chill. For my entire life, I’ve felt like I’ve never been able to get close enough to anyone. I was a chronically insecure kid from the start. I waited on the edges, in the periphery of other people’s lives, first terrified that someone would come up and try to pull me in, and then—after years of feeling alone—just as scared that no one ever would. In that regard, Sam is my opposite. As far as people go, he is almost incomparably warm. He can win any position, breeze through any interview, and endear just about anyone to him. It runs deeper than charisma—he has a unique ability to make everyone feel seen, to treat everyone like they’re valued, even special. When I met him, that was what I needed; we have been close for this long because I clung to that kindness and have yet to let go.
Through the ages, there have been tens of thousands of words written devoted to extolling the virtues of first love, but the romance is the dullest part of this story—even now, just a few years later, the sentimental pull is all but gone. The real love story is about what happened after. The first few awkward weeks of friendship, both of us unsure what the new rules were. The decision, somewhere along the line, to say: Screw it. Trying to keep up with the litany of new girls he immediately fell in love with—one time, wingman-ing for hours at the party of someone I hated so he could shoot his shot. Watching b-movies in his basement. Driving to the beach at one in the morning, just to sit in his car and stare at the water. Going to college a thousand miles away and calling him at midnight to sob. Telling him that I didn’t think that I could make it, that I felt completely alone (again), that I was scared I’d never make another friend like him. (And, for all the progress I’ve made, that stands. I’m still not sure that I ever will.)
I have seen enough romantic comedies to know that this sounds like the part of the story where I’m in deep denial about Sam being the person I'm supposed to be with. It seems unlikely to me—at the moment, he is deeply in love with a wonderful person that I hope he marries—but I would be lying if I said I was never jealous. Not of her, specifically, but of all his new friends. All the new people that he meets, all of whom he will invariably treat like they’re wonderful, some of whom might actually be (and funnier and more interesting and better than me to boot). I do also worry, though, that we are ordained to fall in “real” love—just because that would feel so much lesser than what we have going right now. What we’ve got means the world to me, just as it is. Anything else would be a step down.
Love is strange. But, in whatever form it comes in, I don’t think you can ever have too much of it. It is rare, and it is crucial, and I think you have to take what you to get. Sam is the best friend I always wanted and finally have, and I love him. Saying that might not make sense to anyone else. It might not always make sense to me. But I am grateful that I get to tell him that, and that he’s stuck around to hear it. I hope that he is, too.
(02/13/19 6:17am)
I think it would be ill-advised to name the one who hulls and crushes the fruit of my love. So, for those who do not know, I’ll do my best to evoke your jaunty gait, your crackling beard, and freckled face. I’ve typed up this timeline of my affection, though I do not know its purpose. For reference, I suppose.
We fell in love in midsummer, it’s true. And after that? Weeks with only thoughts of you. Sewing my affection between letters in words in messages. Remembering the feeling of your chest on mine, your back, then a car-door between us, then an ocean, then an interstate. As I sweat through simmering summer nights, my dreams held you. Eyes unmoving, you instructed me on how to properly balance as I walked along the curb. I woke up, face tingling. I’d never made eye contact in a dream before. At least not that I could remember. And definitely not with eyes like yours. Kindly, amber, and moss.
When I was awake I obsessed over your occupation of my phone. I skipped, swiped, saved your face, your jump, your dance. From far away I sent emails like darts with strings attached, hoping one would find you and lead you back. I held on tightly to the rim of a messy jam jar. I fell in.
Summertime slowed and I was sustained by an image of you in August. My friend. You’d hug me and shake my hand. Finally, you arrived and we made plans. Not today, but the next one. Plenty of time. Scrambling through work, I gathered things from the office. Texting, arms full, droplets forming and flying. I raced to see if I could beat my time. The train came at five.
I saw you out of the corner of my eye. Gray shirt, lounging, reading a book. Suddenly I was sitting for my final examination. Hadn’t I spent weekends and nights preparing? Your hair and your shoulders, the curve of your ear. A small gulp. I stood still. You didn’t see me, but you would. Your hand plunged into the jam jar, inviting me up. Should I reach out to take it or avoid getting crushed? You looked up. As you approached I thought one thousand things. You looked just like you had in my dream. Smirking then smiling, you folded me up. Very, extremely, incredibly glad to see you.
And after that, we became quite concrete. You’d call me and my heart would beat. Rachel asked if I liked you. I said, “well, I would … .” I would if I wasn’t so terribly afraid that one day I’d force our heads out of this haze only to find empty, freezing air above. I shivered. Cloudless. I decided a hug and a handshake could be enough. I’d cling to your arm inside the jar, just above the jam. Better that than to drown in that viscous stuff.
But that night you sat at my table for hours, listening to babble, hiding your powers. That night I noticed a dart in your back with a string attached. Below a tree (cut down in October), in your white buttoned shirt, you joined me on my jam-covered earth. You stammered and swayed but delivered your message: "I’m feeling these feelings, they’re scary, I’m reeling." I asked to walk and spoke for a while without saying anything at all. I tormented you with my unpracticed admission: "I like you, I do. I think I like you a lot."
(02/13/19 6:13am)
I’m dreaming about the Eagle Nebula. Everyone recognizes a part of it even if they don’t know what it’s called—those three columns of glowing gas clouds and baby stars. I won’t remember anything about the dream once it ends but the shape of the pillars of creation remains stamped on the inside of my eyelids. My left eye opens before my right, which is glued shut by melted mascara. I blink stickily up at his glow–in–the–dark star–speckled ceiling—a poor substitute for what I’ve just woken up from. I try to reassess.
(02/13/19 5:48am)
It took me two full years to start drinking coffee.
(02/13/19 6:18am)
**Content warning: The following text describes sexual assault and can be disturbing and/or triggering for some readers. Please find resources listed at the bottom of the article.**
(02/05/19 5:10am)
I was in the middle of frantically writing down the mechanism for an allylic bromination reaction when the familiar “215” number popped up on my phone. Jumping out of my seat, I felt all eyes in the organic chemistry lecture turned towards me as I sprinted up the steps, burst out of the lecture hall, and breathlessly answered the call from my gastroenterologist. My test results had come back, and I needed to go to the emergency room as soon as possible. As I sat in the hospital bed with an IV pumping fluids into my right arm and a handful of orgo flashcards on the left, I barely had the energy to sit up, let alone study for my exam next week.
(01/30/19 2:21am)
If you saw me walking down Locust today, you’d probably see me as a short, quiet, baby–faced, curly–haired, racially ambiguous woman with muscular legs and tattoos. But to the few people here on campus that know me beyond that, I’m also a first–generation, low–income, city kid from Chicago with social anxiety.
(01/23/19 4:38am)
La La Land is one of my favorite movies. From its masterful 20th century Hollywood tribute to the heart–wrenching goodbye between soulmates, La La Land stuck with me for months after I first saw it. It stuck with me not only because of its dreamy soundtrack, but it caused the deep and unsettling realization that I do not have a passion.
(01/18/19 2:00pm)
Word on the Street is 34th Street's personal narrative section. We want to elevate Penn student voices to tell their stories—stories that make us laugh, cry, think, and everything in between. Want to see your story in Street this semester? Submit a pitch to this form and contact WOTS editors Mehek Boparai (mehek@sas.upenn.edu) or Hannah Yusuf ( hyusuf@sas.upenn.edu) with any questions.