I used to think that love would announce itself—that I would meet someone and know immediately whether it was love. That it would be so clear and unmistakable I couldn’t ignore it. In the poems I wrote, the books I read, and the films I watched, I looked for love, hoping that I might one day recognize myself in the people I was writing, reading, and watching.
But that expectation never aligned with my real life. At 20 years old, I am frankly unsure if I’ve experienced romantic love.
What I am sure of, though, is that the most important relationships in my life didn’t announce themselves when they began.
They entered as moments that I almost missed. A seat taken beside me in a lecture hall because there were no others left, and suddenly I had a friend who understood the loneliness of being so far from home. A conversation outside a party that stretched longer than it should have, past midnight and into the cold, neither of us willing to say goodbye first. A walk home where we got lost from too many detours through unfamiliar streets, until the aimless wandering itself became the memory I kept returning to.
This issue explores love through the lens of “meet–cutes”—not necessarily the promise of romance, but those strange, fleeting moments when someone enters your life without any explanation. Some grow into romantic love, and some become friendship. Others dissolve into nothing but a memory of what could’ve been. All of them, though, are beginnings. All of them change who we’re becoming, even if we don’t know it yet.
I frequently think about the beginnings I’ve never asked for that have unraveled into something more: the people I met at New Student Orientation, when I was still nervous and trying too hard; the faces I learned while wading through the cornfields of the Midwest, where everything was vast and infinite; my high school friends, whom I only became close with because we were struggling together in chemistry class; the woman I befriended on the plane who offered to connect me with someone at Apple if I ever wanted to work in tech (I don’t); the acquaintance I made at a Kelly Writers House speakeasy.
Maybe that’s what makes meet–cutes so compelling—that they remind us of how little control we have over our lives. How love, in all its forms, often begins not with clarity or certainty, but with chance.
Whoever you are, whether we still know each other or have long since drifted into our separate lives, I hope our paths cross again someday.
And to you, the reader—maybe we’ll meet sometime soon, too.
SSSF,
Samantha Hsiung
