Melany Perez

The first time I stayed at his Upper East Side apartment on a cold February night, it was a mistake. We had talked for so long, I missed the last train back to New Haven. When I woke up the next morning, he offered to make coffee. He asked how I liked it: two spoonfuls of sugar and enough milk to turn it a shade of light brown. I had never been with someone who remembered the little things, let alone the big ones. After about five cups of coffee — not because I needed the caffeine, but because I wanted to be around him longer — he sent me off to my train at Grand Central. A few weeks later, we broke up. In early September, we gave it another try. He stayed over at my apartment for the first time and asked if he could make us coffee. Of course, I said yes. After seven months, he still remembered: two spoonfuls of sugar and milk until the coffee turns light brown. I remembered how understood he made me feel all those months ago. Now, I have the privilege of feeling that way everyday. 

– Bri Anderson

My best friend and I met while quarantining in the same hotel before freshman year at boarding school. We were two of the few Korean students in our class. Four years later, as second-semester seniors, we would take edibles and grab Korean BBQ on random weekdays, intoxicated by the promise of dopamine from a taste of home and always overestimating our stomachs’ respective capacities. We would laugh endlessly throughout dinner, giggling over boys and our Korean running jokes as we worked our way through the samgyupsal. Sandra goes to school in upstate New York now, and we met in the city two weekends ago. After a disappointing Friday night — we both threw up in the bathroom at an Uptown bar — we woke up at noon. Hideously hungover, we obeyed our mutual instinct and took the 1 down to Koreatown for lunch. The menu overwhelmed us, and being the indecisive duo that we are, we ordered three entrées for our teeny tiny selves. Sitting across from each other, we rejuvenated ourselves with the warm gukbap. As we reminisced about our familiar, careless high school days, we were wistful in tone but silently grateful to have each other.

– Jaeha Jang

My brother cracked my tooth on the trampoline. Bouncing out of sync, I went down as he went up. His head speared into mine, slamming my jaw shut and cracking my tooth into bits. I don’t think of that moment when I run my tongue over my teeth, feeling the divots that he left. I think of the warm summer evenings we spent bounding across that black net, always him rising as I fell. We had legs like newborn colts, thin and lanky. We wobbled and fell and crashed into each other, screaming with glee. We filled the trampoline with flowers from the dusty field behind our backyard, leaping back and forth on opposite ends to watch the flowers dance: up and down and up and down. 

We haven’t jumped on that trampoline in years. The flowers have long since bristled up from the field, spearing through the black net. I miss those brief moments suspended in the air — when we passed each other in trajectory and I could see my brother’s face, a fleeting blur of gap-toothed glee as he rose

– Julian Raymond

Before I left for college, Grandpa made one simple request: to send him a smiling emoji every night before bed. Now, our texts are an ongoing chain of smiley faces, video calls and taunting pictures of my favorite Chinese dishes that he has just made.

Each evening, I declare goodnight with an emoji that has the best goofy-granddaughter-to-serious-student ratio before subscribing to the freshman-starter-pack bedtime routine: attempting the worm on the carpeted common room floor, racing against the PSET in the Murray library or trying to get a signal at the basement of a frat party. To squander the cat’s eight lives before 2:30 a.m., and use the remaining one to haul my ass to my 9 a.m., hungover on life.

But the moment my notification pings in his pocket on the other side of the world, I tuck myself into the folds of his mind: dreaming in amber memories, blanketed to fossils by the ways I love him so. As my smile takes the red eye across the 12-hour time zone, I stifle the urge to tell him how I love this world through you. I won’t dare to think this in Chinese, lest it feels too true.

– Helen Zhang