The Hoya: Love Locks: February 12, 2016

the guide

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2016

ILLUSTRATION BY JESUS RODRIGUEZ/THE HOYA

B2

the guide

THE HOYA

friday, february 12, 2016

STEPHANIE YUAN/THE HOYA

The Almost-Right Guys Jennifer Simons COL ’18

T

he deal breakers were always clear: height and religion. I’m 5’10” and I enjoy wearing boots that add two inches.

Generally, boys shorter than me shy away.

Those who approach me establish the platonic nature of our friendship up front.

Height is easy.

Religion is a little more complicated. It’s natural to want to be with someone who shares your worldview, but the question of how closely they need to align is fuzzy at best. Christianity is such a broad spectrum, on which I fall on the extreme liberal periphery. Thus far, belief in God has been my only box to check.

He was 6’7” and Christian. It began with a text. That text cascaded into a phone call, then into a Skype call, which morphed into long distance within a month. We spent my freshman year making plans for the next time we could see each other. My phone constantly flashed with “I love you,” and on Valentine’s Day, he bought me an emerald necklace — true love, clearly. Despite my uncertainty about those affectionate words I was unaccustomed to, I reciprocated his promises. Spending more time together over the summer brought to light my insecurities about our relationship. His depression, anxiety, unstable family, unclear future and finally, his desire to marry me pushed me over the edge. I ran away, feeling guilty for breaking my promises to him ... at least Summer never lied to Tom. Now, he texts me every once in a while, questioning my current relationship status.

Not long after, I met someone else. He was tall and quiet. His eyes, understanding. His family, close. I was thankful for normalcy.

That first Friday night brought our love for pizza, Vance Joy and “The Office” to light.

Saturday night consisted of fries and handholding. After that weekend, he returned to his busy lifestyle. “Busy”: a word that prevails on this campus; it left me wondering as to whether he had a lot on his plate or I just wasn’t on the plate to begin with. I missed him and the connection that I thought we had. I confided in friends, who pushed me to go beyond my comfort zone and be more forward — to text him, to call him, to ask him out.

Despite thinking that I could never ask a guy out, I caved when the whatifs began to dominate my pride. I called him in a Costco parking lot and asked him to get pizza with me that night. I had predetermined that any answer that was not a yes was a no. It was a no.

Now, whenever I run into him, he asks me how I’m doing, without any intention of making plans.

the guide EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JESS KELHAM-HOHLER

GUIde editor TOBY HUNG

Executive EDITOR SUZANNE MONYAK

PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR NAAZ MODAN

Managing EDITOR JINWOO CHONG

Online EDITOR SHANNON HOU

LAYOUT EDITOR MATTHEW TRUNKO

copy cHIEF jeanine santucci

Still, I met someone else. He frequented the coffee shop where I work. My first memory of him is hearing him order a double shot of espresso “on the rocks” and immediately bursting into a fit of laughter. My coworker and I proceeded to make every alcohol-related joke that we had in us. It didn’t take long for him to ask me out for sushi.

He was the type of person who would know the date of his death if he could, who didn’t have a Spotify account and who had his own apartment in Georgetown.

I thought we couldn’t be more different.

A few months and infrequent catch-ups later, I ended up in his apartment holding a glass of wine. We talked about our lives and to my surprise, our pasts and goals aligned.

These similarities may have increased our fondness of each other, but they couldn’t hide the factors that made us fundamentally incompatible. This recognition didn’t stop us from watching “Casablanca,” drinking more wine and getting comfortable with one another.

Now, I don’t know where we stand and I don’t mind, particularly.

On a ski trip in Quebec, dedicated to skiing hard and partying harder, I met someone else. His facial hair accentuated his smile, and his strong stature had me melting immediately. A wallflower by the bar, he held his drink and looked around uncomfortably. I liked him more for it. I wanted to talk to him, but I couldn’t muster up the courage. Fortune had it that when I went to the hot tub the next day, he sat next to me. We started talking and didn’t stop; we walked back in the snow, holding hands and seeing our breath in the dark.

Over the course of three days, we entered into a vacation relationship. I learned a great deal about him. He was not Christian.

He listened to country music and Top 100 rap. He had a tattoo that all of his siblings also had. Maybe it was the nonexistent stress on the mountain, but he was a clearer image of what I wanted in a partner, more so than my imagination could provide. My anxiety that my standards were too high disappeared. For that, I am eternally grateful.

Our relationship came to a close, and neither of us acknowledged it. We had both done long distance, with no intention of doing it again.

He mentioned that he was planning on studying abroad in Australia the following spring. I too have plans to be in Sydney, but I got scared that telling him would put too much pressure on our casual “vacationship.” I lied, suggesting that I was going elsewhere. He kissed me when he left and I didn’t have the heart to say goodbye the next morning.

Now, we catch up over text weekly, trying not to change the memories.

Dear readers, “Love Locks: The Hoya’s Open Diary” is an issue of creative nonfiction pieces and photography submissions from members of the Georgetown community. Now in its second volume, this issue features selected pieces in the written and visual mediums that address love from a variety of perspectives — including stories of romantic love, breakups, self-discovery and familial relationships — that the authors have experienced, complemented by thematic artwork. We invite you to read all the published pieces with their corresponding photos on our online features platform: www. thehoya.com/love-locks-volume-2.

friday, february 12, 2016

the guide

THE HOYA

B3

The Choices We Make, the Ones We Leave Cyrena Touros COL ’18

I

hear his shuffling feet approach before I see him step through my doorway. Sean can be silent when he wants to, popping up behind me with a “What’s that?” as I lock my phone, obscuring whatever article I’m reading or social media site I’m using (It’s useless though — he knows my password and has made one of the stored fingerprints on my phone his). But something about those shuffling feet — bare skin sweeping across cool, tiled floors and onto the threshold of my carpet — is reserved for this: entry into my room.

“Can I come in?”

I don’t look up as I hear his heels and toes ask me that silent question. I simply pat the left side of my bed — the fluffy white comforter letting out air with a swoosh and a few long, yellow dog hairs from Spark jumping into the air only to float back down — and the unsure expression on his face clears like the Florida sky after a summer rainstorm and into a small smile, all lips and no teeth.

All soft blue sky and hesitant sun and damp crabgrass. His eyes dance like palm fronds in the breeze as he takes one large stride into my room and launches himself onto the bed. An 18-year-old human javelin.

The dog hairs explode in a cloud this time, and I hear their tired sigh as they meander back down.

He turns his head toward me, and this time even the sightless, mint walls can’t miss his mischievous smile.

It threatens to pop his cheeks, his nose crinkled with childish glee.

“Hi.” He spits it out in one quick burst of air from the back of his throat. Sean talks like no one else I’ve ever met. But then again, I’ve never met Sean. I know him.

“Hey.” I try to shoot it out, just like him — conversing with Sean is a performance art in code-switching — but he is inimitable. We haven’t made eye contact yet, and it makes him antsy (Who would have thought his pure, spring greens and my filtered black cups of coffee could have come from the same gene pool?). Stomach-down on my bed, his body twitches. “Pay attention to me,” it whines. I string him out for a few more seconds.

“You’re such a cat,” I quip. It’s our new fa-

vorite joke.

He swipes at my arm as if he has paws, and I finally indulge him. Green meets brown, and we’re a forest. His right eyebrow quirks as he purrs “Le chat noir” (sha no-ar), completing the exchange. It took him three times to come up with that response. It’s clever of him, and that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve spent more time analyzing his speech patterns and seemingly carelessly selected words than I have studying the works of famous authors. I don’t know if his unprecedentedness was the childhood spark to my artist imagination all those years ago, or my lifelong fascination with words and language has been accidentally woven into his identity. Either way, we have doubtlessly sculpted each other.

“Sha nwah,” I correct him. He knows that I have barely any more authority on the French language than he does. He gives a Cheshire grin as he wrangles up his best Texan accent. “Nohh-arrrrrr.” Brad Pitt’s character in “Inglourious Basterds” would be proud.

“Shut up!”

He fakes a feminine giggle as I playfully slap his arm. He makes an exaggerated face: bulging eyes, chin pressed down into his neck, teeth bared in a clownish smile and his tongue left exposed in gesture. His shoulders climb to his ears and he flips a hand at me, bent in a 90-degree angle at the wrist. The visual representation of “tee hee.”

Chat noir. Black cat.

Sean has known me for 6,604 days, and he is a master of flipping my words around at me. If I want to tease him, he’s going to press back. He may be a cat, but I am the black cat. Bad luck in earthly form.

He knows this about me, and it’s a reminder: You’re walking misfortune and a right mess, but you’re alright, I guess.

“Vineyard vineyards.” It’s the same word twice, but he pronounces the first with a long “i,” the second with a short. “Viiin-yard vihn-yerds.” Sean doesn’t have to resort to poking me when he can play this linguistic game instead. He’s mocking me. Correcting his French — a language that neither of us speaks — was very Georgetown of me.

“Vineyard vines,” I sigh, stressing the right sounds.

He shakes his head in disapproval at me and resolutely intones: “Vineyard vineyards.”

“You’re incorrigible,” I mutter as I turn my face away. He does the same, so that while

I’m watching the ceiling fan turn circles overhead, he’s breathing into my pillow. We stay like this in silence for a length of time; seconds, minutes and hours are all so fungible.

“Time is an illusion,” as Sean likes to remind me. Ever the burgeoning astrophysicist.

“Do you have to go?”

The question muddies whatever clear moment of household boredom we are entertaining.

Nails clicking against the tile start as a soft sound in the distance, then slowly get louder until there’s a curious pair of brown eyes staring up at me. I pat the space next to me that is left unoccupied by Sean, and the deja vu is acute as the source of all the dog hair flings itself upward and in between us.

I don’t look at him. I take my time to run my hand down Spark’s back in long and slow strokes. I don’t want to see the sadness painting Sean’s features, drawing his lips downward, creasing the skin between his eyebrows.

We are brother and sister by design, but we are friends by choice. “Best friends,” a voice

in my head whispers.

This mercifully extended winter break is the longest time I’ve been home since leaving for college a year and a half ago. I don’t love Georgetown; Sean knows this. “Do you have to go?” isn’t the question he’s asking me. It’s “Why can’t you stay?”

It’s “Why go back and be unhappy when you could stay here with me?”

It’s complicated. Anything worth fighting for is, but that doesn’t make it easier. Sean will be graduating soon and moving on. And as much as I abhor the idea, in the next few years my dog will die. And my parents will still be home, but they understand. Sean doesn’t right now, and that’s okay. I hope one day soon that he will, so I tell him.

“Yeah. There may be nothing good waiting for me around the corner, but you know me.”

I shrug. “Aut viam inveniam aut faciam”: Either I will find a way or I will make one.

(He lets me get away with this one. Even though I’ve changed my major five times, I did start out as classics.)

And so, I forge ahead. Soon, Sean will, too.

NAAZ MODAN/THE HOYA

The Dance Class Summer Park COL ’18

I

’m peeking into a homely dance studio through a keyhole. The young ballerinas in “The Dance Class” painted by Edgar Degas are flushed with tension as they wait to be assessed by their ballet master. Behind the ballerinas in their gay tutus, each with a big, vibrant-colored sash, is a group of older women in rather muted dresses, sitting silently in the back corner: their mothers.

You’re one of them, mom.

When everyone else was stifled by the humid weather, you would wear a goose-down jacket and say, “It’s freezing outside!”

Yet the Canadian cold never bothered you when you took my sister and me to a place to which you had never been and where you knew no one. Piercing through the Albertan cold, you always left the house early to start heating up the car, ready to drive us to school

while we were savoring our breakfast.

Dragging a 90-pound body, you attended every parent-teacher conference, asking questions with your self-taught English that was perfect in grammar, but with such an awkward use of advanced diction that would only appear on the English proficiency tests for which you studied. When you stood among other parents, you seemed so small, even with your giant parka that probably made you look twice your size. I always wondered why you chose to take us to a place that made you look even smaller.

“I don’t want anything from you, but to be able to speak English fluently,” you would say.

There were certain things you always fantasized about. Speaking English fluently was one of them, and the other big one was living in the city.

When people around the world were laughing at the amusing “Gangnam Style” music video a few years ago, I knew that to

you, Gangnam was not merely about a male singer performing comical dance moves.

Gangnam: the most affluent city in South Korea where the city lights make the night shine brighter than the day. This was the lavish city life that you had been hankering after since you were young. Indeed, the luxury was enough to attract you as a little girl who was born and raised in Gongju, a remote village where you meandered through an alley carpeted with bristle grass to go to school every morning. After school, you would help out your parents in the 100-square-foot drugstore, while giving piggyback rides to each of your younger siblings.

One day you told me that you had wanted to be a hairdresser as a child. I asked why.

“I like pretty things,” you said.

Instead, you became the very first female doctor in Gongju. You said you were “forced” to be a doctor by your father, of whom you were so afraid that you never got to tell him

JULIA ANASTOS/THE HOYA

what you really wanted to be.

You could have done the same to me, but you never forced me to become anything — nothing but a spoiled child. Having transferred kindergartens three times within two months, I wasn’t half the sociable kid you had hoped I would be. On the first day of kindergarten, I told you that I had the worst stomachache in the first five years of my entire life, and that I knew it was going to last as long as I was in that place. I used the same reason for not liking the other two kindergartens, except that I cunningly replaced the symptom with a headache and a sore throat.

In the end, you had no choice but to drop me off at my grandparents’ house every morning while you and dad were working from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.

I whined as a high school sophomore too.

That time over the phone from Baltimore, not expecting you to fly there the next morning saying, “I’m taking you back.”

Eventually, you ended up staying in Baltimore with me till the end of the year. Not having any relatives in the region, you decided we’d stay at a Korean couple’s house that you came across while searching for a guest house online. And over the two months of our stay at the couple’s house, I saw you cook breakfast, clean up, trying so hard to get along with the host. Only in June did I realize you didn’t belong here, cooking for strangers while the patients back home were waiting for you.

I used to think you’d always stay as a strong person until the fall of 2013 — the fall that my uncle committed suicide. My cousin told me you let out a big wail as soon as you saw his picture at the funeral.

But only after a few days, you started taking each of your siblings, including your widowed sister, to the psychiatrist every week.

You did that for over a year while you were taking medication yourself, treating your own patients and, at the same time, keeping track of my college decisions.

Watching you at the “Esprit Dior” exhibition last summer tore me up inside, because you looked so happy. You loved the pink, the opulent skirts and the dresses rippling with elegant laces and flattering flounce hems. All of a sudden, you were back to that girl who secretly wanted to be a hairdresser. You’ve always liked the pretty things. Those were all you wanted to see in the world.

The ballerinas are fluffing their tutus. Shh — it’s now my turn.

I whip around my body and brush my leg straight into the air, as I strive to make my steps look better to the ballet master. Oops, I stumbled again. When will I ever be able to show you the perfect, pretty dance moves?

Then, Degas whispers into my ear to pause, turn around and see who’s been waiting.

And there you still stand; so small, yet so strong.

B4

the guide

THE HOYA

Friday, february 12, 2016

ELIZA MINEAUX/THE HOYA

Tomb-Sweeping Day ho Yao Nian SFS ’18

I

remember when I first heard the news.

A grave Sergeant Timothy, the curious taste of tears mixed with camouflage cream and the pain. In the bunk, my phone displayed 16 missed calls, five messages and a timestamp telling me I had missed Yeye’s (paternal grandfather) last moments by six hours. Traditional Chinese funerals in Singapore seemed almost anachronistic, and Yeye’s death had brought the administrative burden of one to bear upon both his sons. An undertaker and priests were engaged. The void deck converted into a reception area, housed both the altar and coffin. Death was an unfamiliar visitor but we welcomed Him nonetheless.

I spent most of the day leafing through “Kokoro” and entertaining visitors. At night, the males in the family were to keep vigil over the body and renew incense at the altar, but Bofu (uncle, my father’s elder brother) and his son were forbidden from touching the “unholy.” I distracted myself with the Internet as my father lit the first coil of sandalwood of the night. I was a product of my time after all. The sweet, cloying scent crept toward me and waves of nostalgia, followed closely by acute grief, assailed my consciousness. “Christians,” my father muttered.

“Christians,” I echoed.

My father, whom I had always known as a strong and even often stubborn man, was at present reduced to a flickering shadow of his former self. His bloodshot eyes and seemingly gaunt features were evidently reflective of the weariness within. He had inherited the responsibility of an eldest son by virtue of a divergence between his and Bofu’s faith. As the hours passed, I listened to him complain many a time about how divorced from tradition my uncle and his family had become and how they had chosen God over Yeye. I managed only weak nods and murmurs of assent. I was no Christian, but it was unlikely that my father’s own death would ever see such an elaborate reception.

Yeye was an emperor, I used to say. Born in the year of the Dragon, Yeye was an aptly royal source of entertainment to my 7-yearold sensibilities. Giggling, I would prostrate myself before him as court officials did, repeating between kowtows, “May you live tens of thousands of years Great Emperor!” I was reminded of this as I admired the large paper palace commissioned for Yeye. As I stood before the palace mere minutes before the burning commenced, it took on a curious incandescence, street lighting and foil paper conspiring to give it the appearance of a living, breathing entity. Tiny palace maids adorned the steps leading up to the entrance where imperial guards stood. Chinese dragons atop the roofs stared down at anyone

who approached as did a pair of stone lions below. All of it felt complete for the send-off save for the anachronistic silver sedan. Yeye was a taxi driver before he retired. I held my breath as I felt a stab of pain with that realization.

Paper ingots were already heaped below the palace. Lit matchsticks were thrown. My parents started adding the rest of the folded ingots. The undertaker decided to help, reaching into the bags of foil-paper. Bofu and his wife stood behind us, watching as the conflagration burst into existence. Smoke and ash danced in the air as I felt tears brimming in my eyes once more. I wondered again what we were grieving over. Yeye had stopped responding to my addresses for about a year now. Had no one else noticed?

At the crematorium, Yeye’s body had just been sent onward on its final journey. I could feel the heat emanating from behind the glass. Yet curiously, I could summon no tears or sobs, only a pervasive sensation of nothingness until the guilt of apparent indifference set in. I stole a look at my father. He was looking down at the ground, face ashen. It was not a complicated affair. In fact, the cremation itself was underwhelming. In a mere matter of minutes, all began to retire from the viewing gallery.

Bofu’s daughter was weeping, her husband’s comforting arm around her shoulders, when my father breaking into sobs, turned to her and began, almost chiding, in Mandarin: “You remember! Remember how Yeye used to dote on, used to take care of you! All these years! Raising you! Cooking! Sending you to school! Remember!”

All his resentment toward Bofu and his family seemed to culminate in that single outburst. My father stood there, alone, resolute and defiant. He was the last line of defense against an insurmountable enemy, fully cognizant of his own imminent destruction. I watched him there sobbing and my chest felt a familiar constriction. And yet I could only watch.

We shared our love for Yeye, but held different conceptions of it. Duty to my father could not be decoupled from love. Passion without commitment would be of a vapid, meaningless sort, founded on empty words and transcendent impulses. But love for me was unconditional, boundless, timeless and vulnerable, the kind he had never been inclined toward.

I walked with my father to the car as the evening cicadas conversed in our place. In the car especially, the silence was deafening. We stared ahead. Without thinking, I spoke.

“When is Tomb-Sweeping Day? Take me to sweep the tombs next year.” My father stayed silent. Watery eyes refusing to meet my own, he reached out to clasp my hand in his.

It was brief.

But it was enough.

JULIA ANASTOS/THE HOYA

friday, february 12, 2016

the guide

THE HOYA

B5

Do You Love Her? Joshua clark* MSB ’19

I

rushed home from school for my lunch break, ready for my DiGiorno frozen pizza, when I saw a stack of paper, thicker than my wrist; I stopped dead.

Though this could be anything, something about the size, the professional font, the big binder clip, set it out of place in my perfect kitchen that belonged in my perfect house to us as a perfect family. I started reading, “Though both parties have decided not to separate …” It looked like divorce papers, it felt like divorce papers, but it … wasn’t? It didn’t make any sense.

Why was there this giant stack of paper on the kitchen counter about how my parents weren’t getting a divorce?I heard the screams from across the house. My mom screaming bloody murder at my dad and my dad screaming right back. They kept rephrasing an argument that I didn’t fully understand, going absolutely nowhere.

I walked over to my parents — I knew there was something wrong.

“What is going on!?” I asked.

They looked at me for a moment. My mother’s eyes were filled with both tears and red hot rage.

“Why don’t you ask your father?” my mother retorted, not at me but at him. There was venom in her voice, more than I’d ever heard in my entire life.

I looked at him and he looked at the ground.

We all moved to the mocha couch in the dim light, distant from each other. He paused to recompose himself.

“Well … uh,” he started, “I’ve made some mistakes. I haven’t been happy with retiring, my faith and my marriage …”

My mom snapped, interjecting, “Why don’t you get to the point, Mike?”

“Well … I had an, uh, emotional affair …”

An emotional affair? What does that even mean? Like he cheated? Like he was one of those f---ing cliches you see in movies when men have their midlife crisis?

What the f--- is an emotional affair?

“I, uh, had developed feelings for another woman. Just feelings.”

That’s what I thought he meant. But, that’s f---ing stupid. Who confesses to an emotional affair?

“An emotional affair. So nothing … happened?” I looked right into his eyes.

“No — it was never physical,” he declared.

I didn’t believe that. But it was all happening so fast. I came home for a frozen pizza and now I was interrogating my father. I went with the first thing on my mind.

“Who is she?”

He looked down, around the room, then back at the floor.

“Someone from work.”

My mother snapped at this. She had restrained herself long enough, longer than I thought she could.

“He won’t tell me her name. This coward is protecting her.”

My father looked over to my mother with disgust.

“You’re trying to ruin her life.”

“If you don’t sign this agreement, I will call every f- - -ing person I know at your job and find out who she is. I will ruin you, Mike.”

I was so confused. The other emotions were coming, but right now it was just confusion.

The agreement, the stack of papers on the counter?

“What is this ‘agreement?’” I asked, not knowing where else to start.

“It divides up the assets in the event of divorce,” my mom shouted.

So they were doing all the paperwork before getting divorced? Like they were staying together?

“Yeah, and your mother is trying to take away everything from me, leaving me without enough money to survive. If I don’t sign this agreement, which doesn’t even come close to how much money I deserve, she will ruin my life and prevent me from ever being able to make money again,” he pleaded to me.

“He’s trying to have his affair and all the money and that’s not how this works!” my mom shouted at me, in a mixture of screaming and crying.

They were using me as a pawn in the argument. They were fighting about money through me, trying to gain my sympathy for their side. My mother tried to have me channel her anger. My father, the man who has just admitted to having an “emotional” affair was trying to get me to pity him. My brain tumbled, thoughts and emotions intermingling into an incomprehensible mess.

“It wasn’t physical? You swear?” I asked again, point blank.

“No, I swear on my mother’s grave.”

I asked him once more after that, to the same response. This was not true, as I would learn later. Knowing that my father can look at me in the eyes and lie to me three times in a row may be one of the most frightening things I can imagine.

“Do you love her?”

He didn’t answer. I think I prefer it that way, I don’t think I could have handled his answer.

The illusion of my parents was shattered.

They are people, sexual beings just like I am, which is terrifying. I found out more about my parents than I ever wanted to know. I did not see my father as the strong breadwinner — I saw him as a dirty, disgusting old man. I did not see my mother as the bear protecting her cubs anymore — I saw her weak and broken and raw.

My brain started to process everything, how my life would change. Of course I had no idea how truly worse it would get, but I knew enough. My memories were all tainted a sickly black. When he came in to kiss me goodnight, had he just kissed her right before? When he was on his phone texting, was he promising her sweet nothings? On Christmas morning, did he make sure that she had a present to open from him too? I wanted to vomit. The world spun around me and my breath quickened, panic rising.

I had lost my appetite. I ran out of my house, got into my car and drove. I parked in the middle of nowhere, skipped the rest of school and sobbed. *Pseudonym used to protect author’s identity.

JINWOO CHONG/THE HOYA

B6

the guide

THE HOYA

Friday, february 12, 2016

Soulmate City Melina Delkic COL ’17

W

RACHEL PARK/THE HOYA

hen I was 7, I came up with the theory that everyone in the world has a soulmate city. It might be a city, a town, a building, a body of water or any location where you can be your truest self. It’s a place where you fit. Perfectly. Back then, I thought that mine was Ikea.

So when the Georgetown brochures settled into my mailbox four years ago, I took a minute to stare at the gothic grandeur of Healy Hall and the perfect green lawns and the out-of-place brutalism of Lauinger Library before deciding that this would be mine. I watched movies about a perfect Georgetown and I wondered how I would fit into those buildings, what kind of a person I would be when I fell in love with the Hilltop and found the perfect major and the perfect life plan and the perfect me.

Except that Georgetown didn’t end up being the stuff of brochures or movies or dreams, at all. Those buildings were just buildings; those degrees were just degrees. I never found a perfect plan or a perfect me.

Georgetown, really, is us sliding through O Street last February after that ice storm, gripping picket fences for balance because John Kerry never shovels his damn driveway, dreaming together about our next soulmate cities and the people that we would become there.

Georgetown is us skipping down Prospect, as freshmen do, beaming, screaming Gwen Stefani lyrics in a world that is small and cozy and safe.

Georgetown is us peeking into windows at the intersection of 33rd and Q or 34th and N and dreaming of having our own gardens and bookcases and golden retrievers someday.

Georgetown is Wisey’s tuna melts and Lilli Vanillis from MUG, even though we’re already late to class, and kayaking on the Potomac when it gets warm. It’s how things taste better at The Tombs, even if they really don’t. It’s sitting on the waterfront in the spring, trying not to get attacked by birds.

Georgetown is Monday mornings in our apartment before my first class, when the sun-

light warms our hardwood floors and everyone shuffles into the kitchen, still too sleepy to be stressed.

Georgetown is us dancing on tables in our living room, screaming Whitney Houston until someone spills wine and we have to run for the Swiffer. Georgetown is when we wake up at the crack of dawn, maybe for First Bake or the cherry blossoms or some sort of trip somewhere, and we meet at the front gates and try to seem alive and wait for the ones who are late and somehow find the energy to laugh.

It’s about the way that your heels clack on the floors of Healy, and the nostalgia that you feel for the things that happened there before you ever existed. It’s the way that Dahlgren Chapel looks for a few days when the leaves change colors in the fall, or before the snow is soiled in the winter, or when the blossoms appear, bloom, explode and then wither in the spring and you find yourself alone there and you just take a moment to stare.

It’s the way that campus stands still in a dreamy kind of way after you’ve been awake for too long and your textbooks have sucked the life out of your face and the coffee has made you twitchy, and you stroll through in a trance and you can’t help but really love it for a minute.

Georgetown is the realization that maybe there is no such thing as belonging. Maybe you never really find that elusive thing called “balance” at all — maybe you just learn to expect highs and lows and find people to help you through them. It’s when you stop planning and fitting, and life becomes unpredictable, and there are no puzzle pieces or schedules or balance. Yet there is somehow, in spite of it or because of it, happiness. Belonging.

Once you realize that there’s no such thing as balance or plans or perfect fits, once your major or your dream job or that class that was supposed to be mind-blowing leaves you disappointed, on the days when the castles from those brochures feel gloomy or small, on the days when you can’t focus or move forward or stand still, it is those people, those moments, that move you, anchor you and define you. They are your Georgetown.

They are your soulmate city.

Philosophizing Over Pizza Emma Wenzinger COL ‘19

T

he last time I saw my best friend was the first time she saw me cry. It was natural, of course, that this happened the last time I saw her, but it struck her that she had never seen my face blotchy and tearstreaked in the more than four years of our close friendship.

This made us laugh with sharp, uneven breaths of hot August air. We were standing in the parking lot of her favorite pizza place, where we had lunched together almost every day of senior year. I liked its thick-crust square slices less as the school year progressed, but by graduation, she was ordering boxes of it for her party. I had three slices and a sliver of cake.

We knew this day was coming in a sort of unspoken yet shared way. The same day that she keyed my name into the wooden tabletop of our regular corner booth to my urgent pleadings that she not get me into trouble, we wondered aloud about the next year. I figured that she would somehow convince me to mail her Kit Kats weekly, since pizza wouldn’t make it to the opposite side of the country.

She theorized that I would find a boyfriend at some party I hadn’t planned to attend in the first place and made me promise to send her pictures. Her life as a missionary for the next year and a half would certainly be lacking in drama.

The night that she received her mission call, her family members and I gathered around her, managing six phones to accommodate everyone wanting to hear her reading the letter — her two best friends from church, her mother’s family and her boyfriend. Even with the already-wrinkled letter and its accompanying map of Arizona between us as we fell asleep in her bed that night, the truth of it all was not yet fathomable. We woke up in the morning to cold slices of pizza, which we ate haphazardly on the drive to school.

We did everything there was to do the day before I left for Georgetown. In the morning, we drove up to Syracuse, playing “Hannah Montana” and “High School Musical” loudly to accommodate her hearing aids and my enthusiasm. She won the go-kart race. We made teddy bears resembling each other and buckled them into the back seat of my car for the drive home. Every time we passed a truck, she signaled to the driver to blast the horn, and the one time she was successful, I threw my hands up from the steering wheel in victory as we looked at each other and screamed happily.

We didn’t eat dinner at the pizza place that night, instead choosing a locally owned diner near our high school that was everyone’s favorite. It was understood between us that pizza was reserved for the last day.

It struck me that we had rarely spoken honestly about our friendship. When we first became friends, I was ending an unhealthy friendship and was hesitant to call anyone my best friend. She had other close friends anyway, so when we did seem to fit that label, it wasn’t one that we took on in any high

school-grade official capacity. That is to say, we did friendship more than we were part of a friendship. We came up with a theory to explain it when we were walking into school one day. We had already coined the term “proximity friend,” which we used to refer to those friends with whom we were, well, friendly, but only on the basis of being in the same class or garnering likes on Instagram.

She and I, however, were friends because of something deeper. When you thought about it, she pointed out, our personalities were quite different — she was outgoing and the first to make friends, while I was quiet and serious. What we largely shared were the same values, which formed a much stronger bond between us than calculus or social media ever could.

When we tried to put all of this into words on the last day, it came out in short, uncer-

tain bursts of my “these last four years” or her “man, high school is a long time.” A woman walked across the parking lot of the pizza place, watching as we embraced. We let go and got into our separate cars, my tears falling faster as I waved her ahead of me one last time.

I write to her almost every day, sharing all the details in the same way that our never-ending stream of texts used to. Though she can only email once each week, her

emails tell me everything. I have found comfort in remembering all of these little things that defined our friendship for so long, which have changed. Mostly, though, I remind myself of the things that truly make us close, which won’t.

Ever since I first cried in front of her, I am assured that she knows what our friendship means to me.

And though I had seen her eyes rimmed in pink before, I know who I am to her too.

NAAZ MODAN/THE HOYA

the guide

friday, February 12, 2016

THE HOYA

B7

CLAIRE SOISSON/THE HOYA

LAUREN SEIBEL/THE HOYA

LAUREN SEIBEL/THE HOYA

LAUREN SEIBEL/THE HOYA

2/12/2016 Kathryn Elstob COL ’16

I wanted to be in love until I was.

It was beautiful, it was unknown and deep. It felt like swimming in the Great Barrier Reef. The rainbow fishes and living coral gardens of underwater dreams went on for leagues, offering more and more reasons to stay. But my air tank had begun its warnings.

And I swam, ignoring it, breathing less. My lungs on fire. A school of shimmering life still glistening in my foreground. And I breathe and burn and there’s so much beauty around me, but pressure and loss of oxygen blur my vision and I can no longer see. I need to swim upwards. I need new air.

It is a love story that I will tell backwards.

It is Saturday, February 6, 2016. I will call you this afternoon — but I will be so nervous it will likely become this evening. Or the witching hours of tomorrow morning. I will tell you that I’ve called to break your heart, that I love you, and that you cannot visit next weekend. I will say the line about the Great Barrier Reef — which you will appreciate, because we are both writers — and I will try to explain how the fact that I cannot envision my life without you has slowly made my love succumb to terror.

2/5/2016: We are FaceTiming each other good night. “Show me your booooooobs.”

“It’s dark! I’m cold! You only have to wait a week!” “You’re the worst. I love you.” “I love you.” “So much, babe. You are my rock.” “And you are mine. Goodnight.”

1/2/2016: I lie to my family and say I broke up with you.

12/31/2015: We kiss at midnight. Later, when we’re lying together in your bed, you confess that Sara said you should marry me. I kiss your neck and smile your favorite smile.

12/28/2015: I have a panic attack in my sis-

ter’s mirror. We haven’t seen each other for five months. I question whether I should get on the train.

9/5/2015: I arrived in France three days ago.

It is 11 p.m., 5 p.m. in Buffalo. The Wi-Fi in my apartment barely boasts the apex dot, but we try to Skype. I am desperate to see your face. I tuck my laptop under my arm and run two miles to the Apple Store. I lean against its stone exterior, steal its four-bar signal, and our virtual selves sit together for almost three hours.

Sometimes talking.

Sometimes merely memorizing the wavering facsimiles of each other’s face.

7 / 2 2 / 2 0 15 : We meet in the middle in Corning, N.Y. We visit the Glass Museum and Watkins Glen. We come, together, with the backseat down in your red Subaru, in a parking lot behind Main Street.

5/15/2015: Castleton, Vt., is the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Dillon drives the pickup down an endless coniferous road while four of us, drunk and high, lie tangled in the truck bed. You drape your arm across my hips and bite my ear while Dave and Noonan giggle over nonsensical sex jokes. I recognize some constellations, hovering like mobiles, amid the prickling universe that swims across the sky.

3/28/2015: I cheat on you. With sex.

2/17/2015: Two and a half empty bottles of

wine are strewn about the bed, and you balance a bowl of popcorn on your bare stomach. I explore your shoulder muscles with my fingers and tickle your calves with my toes. We’re snowed in and watching “Frozen” at an Airbnb three blocks from my roommate-ridden house.

11/27/2014: “Your parents don’t like me.”

“They do,” I lie. “It’s just … they don’t like the idea of you.” “Kate … I love you.”

10/11/2014: You show me your home. I meet your dogs. You make your venison chili and introduce me to your high school soccer coach. We explore your woods and don’t speak because you’re showing me clearings and trees and land that are sacred to you — and now to me. I notice how the sun looks behind a glowing canopy of autumn maple leaves.

7/4/2014: Multicolored sparkles illuminate their smoky predecessors over the peaks and crags of the Ausable Valley. The gloomy silhouettes of the Sawteeth Range quiver in the distance. We revel in the fact that we’ve returned, together, to our wonderland.

6/27/2014: Forgotten feelings for Luke brandish themselves on a purple beach at 2 a.m. in Cape Cod. 1/24/2014: “I just received your letter. I have tried very hard my whole life to not

need anything beyond the essentials, but more and more I find that I need you. I only wish that you could be here with me, or that we could again be in the mountains as we once were. I miss you.”

1/13/2014: I’m falling in love with you. I believe in every part of you completely, and in spite of life, I always will. I’ll spend more than a few minutes dawdling in front of the mailbox later, I can assure you of that.

Love, Kate 12/29/2013: I meet your family. You spend the whole two days with your palms on my knees and the small of my back.

10/13/2013: I’m nervous to see you. I’ve driven around Castleton for half an hour avoiding your front porch. You hug me when I finally arrive. Later, you will get blackout with your friends, and I will cry — confused and missing summer — as I drive home.

9/3/2013: If I never see you again I will always carry you inside outside on my fingertips and at brain edges and in centers centers of what I am of what remains Thank you for the constellations, and the ukulele, and every word that begins with “y.” Thanks for every hour of lost sleep, Indian Head, all 774 songs, waltzing in the rain, the meteors on Mosso’s and the full moon on the roof. Thank you for everything you gave me, and thanks for the adventure.

With all my heart, I believe you’ll live exceptionally.

Always, Kate August, 2013: We fall in star-crossed love.

B8

THE HOYA

The Box Of Chocolates Christine Yang SFS ’18

M

ilk Chocolate Hazelnut: Creamy hazelnut praline, covered in two layers of milk chocolate of different cacao compositions, and topped with crunchy hazelnut Again and again, Never was there a worry, With you, under stars.

As we glanced past now, I stared at your chocolate eyes, This time dark, not milk.

Orange and White Chocolate: Smooth and creamy white chocolate filling infused with orange liqueur and coated in white chocolate with tangy orange shavings I do not remember if it was raining or if I was just sobbing so much that it felt like a heavy thunderstorm. I called Cal from the school parking lot and began furiously explaining why my life and future as we knew it were over. As I sped to her house, I couldn’t help but feel my heart melting into the cracks of the concrete. Pulling into her driveway, I thought, “I might be staying here for a while, because how could I ever face my parents?” I walked into Cal’s open arms and soon collapsed on her couch.

In between sobs, I said, “I feel like everything I’ve done in the past three years was for nothing. I ruined everything, and nothing has ever hurt so bad.”

Cal rolled her eyes affectionately, “If anyone could recover from something like this, it would be you.”

Maybe I didn’t know it back then, but she was always right about me.

Espresso and Dark Chocolate: Rich, lasting, 80 percent cacao chocolate center with notes of dark espresso and covered in cacao powder “Mom, the point of staying on the beach is to actually go to the beach.”

“I am almost done. I just have 15 messages, 20 signatures and a few prescriptions to send out.”

“Fine, we’re just going to go now and meet you outside. Also, merry Christmas to you too!”

I really didn’t intend to be rude to my mom all the time. Growing up, I often thought my mom’s hobbies were working, yelling at me for not being perfect and working. I thought back to a memory of when I was nine.

“Mom, mom, mom, listen to me.”

“What do you need?”

“What are you doing? What is that chart? Is that their heartbeat?”

“I’m doing this for you.”

“But — I’m not even your patient.”

Fighting with my mom and for my mom’s attention were among my favorite childhood hobbies. When I think about the various sporting, school and life events my mom missed because she was working, I think about this moment. Even though she was self-employed by name, she was employed in her mind by the thought of my brother’s and my looming, expensive futures.

Milk Chocolate Caramel: light caramel mixed with a sprinkle of sea salt, and coated in homemade milk chocolate “Friend group” is an inherently unfriendly concept to me. I have always had scattered best friends with different friends and interests who occasionally interact, probably because of me. I have a term for this: best friend-in-laws.

Episode I of “Best Friend-in-Laws: Worlds Collide.” In a minivan, a group of best friend-in-laws and I embarked on a road trip to surprise my brother for his birthday. The plan of action: meet up with a friend from school for dinner, buy cake and decorations, set up his apartment with his friends and set him up for the surprise. This trip was planned in less than 24 hours before execution.

My friends from home have known me for eternity; some of us had gone to school together since kindergarten. The reconciling of the here and now with the then and there is something I have struggled with. Coming to school far from home and far from my closest friends seemed to deepen the cracks I couldn’t fill myself. We were meeting my friend Zeke from Georgetown for dinner. We had a few classes together, we had few friends in common and we happened not to live far apart.

At one point during the night, Zeke was dancing fearlessly with one of my friends in the living room as if we all had grown up together. He is the kind of sunshine that streams through the cracks and brightens a room. Each best friend-in-law — despite loud and somewhat disagreeable personalities — instantly loved him.

On the car ride home, one of them told me, “He is going to end up being your best friend.” They were right. When misfits come together for an adventure, we often find what we did not know we were missing.

Mystery Chocolate: That one chocolate that you can’t seem to match to any of the descriptions on the box “I love you.”

“That’s funny.”

Despite everything about our platonic summer of sweet nothings, I left the city for a month. I knew that, true to your character, I probably would never see you again. That was probably for the best, honestly. If I did, I would not have words to say about the relationship that we did not have. While I was away, I sometimes thought about what you were doing: You’d be in some smoky bar with a beautiful woman you’d just met draped on your arm, making everyone around you laugh. I knew forgetting about you was the best thing that I could ever do.

Except here we were, on what started to be a perfectly normal Friday night. We were on the rooftop babbling about everything since that summer. Something intangible about the way you talked made me realize that you avoided being close to people in general — not just me. You quickly spilled details about your life, from your complicated childhood to your deep-seated insecurities. At the same time, your sudden openness did not make me feel special. I knew that you were just having fun, and this was the way we would always be.

Somewhere between the topics of your parents and your fears of the future, you froze midsentence. You kissed my cheek and said, “I love you.”

JINWOO CHONG/THE HOYA

the guide

Friday, february 12, 2016

the guide

FRIDAY, february 12, 2016

THE HOYA

B9

An Unwavering Flame Taylor Harding COL ’18

M

y friendship with Maddi truly began my senior year of high school.

I originally met Maddi, who was a year below me, in second grade when she became best friends with my sister, Katie. We all grew up together, but I really only knew her through my sister. Yet when Katie became preoccupied with her first boyfriend, she did what most love-struck teenagers do and ditched her friends. Maddi and I bonded over Katie’s absence, feeling a kinship over my sister’s behavior. Thus began a series of lunches, drives home from school and gossip sessions between just Maddi and me.

Our friendship developed at the height of my neuroticism, courtesy of standardized testing, too many AP classes and poorly prompted college essays. Focused on getting into the best school possible, I did everything on the straight and narrow.

Rule-breaking or anything mildly frowned upon was something that I steered clear of.

Yet Maddi by nature defied every single rule there was. She cheated on almost every exam, lied to her parents, stole from stores, skipped class, never did her homework, smoked weed

before, during and after school, and sometimes swapped her prescription Adderall for recreational drugs. By everything that I stood for at this point in my life, Maddi was someone that I should have despised.

But I didn’t.

Perhaps I accepted Maddi’s behavior because I had known her for most of her life.

Although we met when we were 8 and 6, respectively, she would always say that we had known each other since we were “out of the womb.”

“Maddi, I met you when you were in first grade,” I’d say.

“Yeah, that’s basically like birth,” she’d reply.

In reality, I d i s r e ga r d e d Maddi’s behavior because I knew it wasn’t a reflection of the person she truly was. The important thing about Maddi, despite all of the poor choices she made, was that she never did them with malice.

It’s not like she was a bad seed, or some troubled kid who was just acting out. Maddi did the things she did because she was fearless. She wanted to experience everything life could offer

and was determined to get a bang for her buck. I saw past all of her faults and questionable reputation, because they all stemmed from her free-spiritedness, curiosity and intense passion for life. She was so much more than whatever was listed on her disciplinary record.

I stuck up for her when she got caught, often doing my best to convince the person she had angered — usually her mother — to go easy on her.

When it came down to picking the counselors for that year’s Outdoor School, the chaperones were reluctant to accept her application. Yet being the obnoxiously good student that I was, my evaluation of her carried weight. After days of convincing, Maddi was provisionally accepted, so long as she behaved up until we left for camp. Thankfully, she did.

Fast-forward to June 3, 2014. It’s my graduation night. She had stood beside me as I opened my acceptance letter to Georgetown, and now she sat between Katie and me in the car on our way to the ceremony. After three painfully boring hours, we all reconvened in the sea of green gowns and bouquets of flowers.

“You’re done with high school!” Maddi said in utter disbelief. After mingling with friends and family, it was time for the graduates to leave for the subsequent class celebration. I hugged my parents, Katie and Maddi, and we parted ways.

As they headed toward the parking lot, I felt the urge to turn around. Maddi appeared to be in no rush to get to the car. My parents and Katie were a few yards ahead of her, already out of earshot. In the midst of her sauntering, she saw that I had turned around.

“I freakin’ love you!” I called out to her. I remember feeling an overwhelming need to say that. She yelled back words that I couldn’t understand and danced off into the parking lot. The setting sun illuminated her red hair, which she had finally grown to love after years of dyeing it black.

That was the last time I saw her. Five days later, Maddi was in a car crash just a few miles away from our neighborhood. She had gone off on a joyride with a boy she was sort of dating. They drove up to the country roads that were notorious for their straightness and minimal police presence. On the way back down, in the midst of trying to catch air off one of the dips in the road, the boy lost control of the car and they spun into a telephone pole at about 110 miles per hour.

The boy died at the scene, and Maddi was declared brain dead around 8 o’clock the next night. She left behind her parents, three sisters, a championship softball team and me.

I think about our friendship often, trying to figure out how I was lucky to have known Maddi the way that I did. No matter how many times she was sent to the principal’s office, assigned community service or had her phone taken away, I knew that she was capable of transcending what the rest of the world thought of her, and would go on to do something amazing with her life.

If it had been anyone else, I would have written them off as a screw-up. But there was something so promising and tender about Maddi that I couldn’t help but just love her.

Not once in my life have I felt that way about anyone else — to love someone so unconditionally, purely and with such acceptance and unshakeable faith. And I will never stop loving her.

NAAZ MODAN/THE HOYA

Ripped SARAH MARTIN COL ’19

The curtains off Because there you go Creating silhouettes you know Fogging up window panes Erasing our yesterdays But there you go Once again Taking my old friend Using her to fill the pain She was lost that New Years Day Silly Girl with Tasmania dreams Bought into your strange brew Drank your poison It turned me blue I’ll blame in on the neurons That you set off within my brain Then you took them back again Creating a neuro catastrophe I f lew across the Pacific Just to see your lovely face But all you were was clear as May Same old monster from New Year’s Day You said that you would change But all you did was take my gold Keeping tabs on our love Is no way to fill the hole Silly Girl with Tasmania dreams Bought into your strange brew Drank your poison It turned me blue I’ll blame in on the neurons That you set off within my brain Then you took them back again Creating a neuro catastrophe I finally got away Unleashed myself from your brain I’m never going back again New York City on New Year’s Day

NAAZ MODAN/THE HOYA