Courtesy of Lauren Bond

To T__, my day 1 partner in goofery, my best friend and my newfound old love — 

The first letter I ever wrote to you began with “This is a gratitude assignment for Psych and the Good Life.” There are a lot of things about it that I love — the letter’s candor about my first-year insecurities — of which there are many — and how it recounts otherwise-forgotten antics from old Snapchat videos. Remember Snapchat? But seeing as it has been four years, I want to give it another go. There are a few things I would like to add to the original letter, and some I would like to correct. 

Since we were first years in an empty Pauli Murray, we’ve gone up, down and sideways. You grew — and then un-grew — a beard. I changed my major to just about everything and then to American Studies. You decided — and then un-decided, and then decided again — to go pre-med. We went from practicing our a cappella auditions together in the white-walled Murray basement and celebrating the Whiffenpoofs’ decision to admit non-men, to donning the silly penguin suits ourselves as the Whiffs of 2021. You fell, then un-fell, then fell back in love with me. I fell in love with you. 

Because I’m a sentimental sap, I often go back to read what I wrote to you in the second semester of our first year. When I do, I remember things about who we were — Snapchat obsession! Political career! And about who we still are: a pair of weird kids, who take care of each other with food. Remember that weekend in February first year when I was knocked out cold with a stomach bug? You showed up with a bottle of Coke and a banana from the dining hall, a combo from my childhood sick days that you thought was awful, but you knew would remind me of home. Another time, you dropped a bunch of snacks on my bed for me to find after a busy day of rehearsal. I wrote, “I honestly think that one of the most generous things to do, and something that shows unconditional love more than almost anything else, is to share your own food.” I used to hate sharing my own food. I don’t anymore, mostly because I don’t have the opportunity to in a pandemic, but also because if I didn’t, how would we get through our running list of recipes to cook? 

Mostly though, when I read back, I see something that I couldn’t have noticed in the middle of freshman year, when I was surrounded by it: how alone I felt. I remember sitting in Bass at 11:30 PM, writing and rewriting, “My biggest fear, coming to college, wasn’t making friends … [it] was the emptiness of knowing that no one yet at Yale, in this place where I was going to make my life, loved me the way I had been loved, so fully and for so long — and I feared the pit in my stomach that told me that to get that kind of love here, the kind of love that makes life about people, I’d have to be extremely patient and extremely lucky.” 

These days, it’s hard to find a moment alone. These days, being “alone” means being just a little less together — it means you clear out of your room for an hour, maybe, so I can take a Zoom call, or it means I sit by the window while you’re at the desk, both of us working on different things and in our own heads. That is, as much as I can truly be in my own head when, about every thirty seconds, you repeat that one phrase of the new arrangement of “Something’s Coming,” or whatever else we learned for the Whiffs that week. Not that I want it any other way. In a year where most socialization has happened online — paradoxically making me and others feel even more isolated when we hang up that Zoom meeting and have to face an empty bedroom — I count myself lucky to steal those quiet moments with you. I also love hearing you sing, even though it actively monopolizes my eardrums. (You are SO loud.) Somewhere, somehow, some part of me even loves telling you to “shush so I can focus!” Well, maybe “loves” is a strong word. The next time I hear “doo, dah, gleam in his eye” … God grant me strength.

Sometimes I think we’ve just about covered it, that neither of us could possibly say something new. You can remember better than I do the memes I’ve already sent you, and you know the story I’m going to tell before I start. You don’t forget the reminder I yelled to you down the hall of your gap-year apartment, or a secret I warily confided on one of those long, cold, distanced walks we took this fall, right before you decided we should stop beating around the bush and just go out already. 

And then there are times when all that goes out the window. Today, you turned to me and said, “I know it goes without saying, but miscommunications happen. I would never kill you for life insurance.” You were half-joking, I knew, and I laughed. But there was something else — the earnestness on your face in that moment, and how I couldn’t shake the thought that this was something that first-year Lauren had never gotten to see. The lonely person who wrote to you in Bass at 11:30 at night didn’t know what it was like for us to be angry at each other, or what it was like to hear you humming a tune in the kitchen at the end of a long day. 

The first time I wrote to you, I thought I was saying thank you to someone who’d been there for me as I got my bearings in a new place, and in a new life. Yale was so new, and I was grateful to have found somebody — almost randomly! — who I felt understood me easily, even without context for my life before move-in day. 

A lot of things are clearer as a gap year senior. Looking back on what I wrote then, it’s obvious that my first letter to you wasn’t a thank-you note — it was a love letter. You probably know that by now. But I just wanted to make sure.

Here’s to the years spent here at Yale, and the ones to come.

Love,

Lauren

P.S. Don’t worry — I’d never kill you for life insurance.