Jessai Flores

Nearly three years ago — though the exact date escapes me — my freshman self was scheduled to get a meal with someone I think was named Stacey.

I canceled because I didn’t feel like going, though I’m decently confident I made up a better excuse at the time. We agreed to reschedule. In reality, we never talked or texted again.

I put up a sign in my freshman entryway inviting anyone and everyone to get lunch. One kid was weird enough to take me up on my offer and became one of my best friends.

I began freshman year best friends with the seven other kids from my FOOT trip. Three went to New York over fall break, a fight went down — the details of which remain murky — and we never reconvened as a group.

I get Family Dinner every Sunday night with three of my randomly assigned freshmen year suitemates plus the two girls whom I hadn’t met until they joined our sophomore sextet.

My pickup basketball rival, improv audition buddy and ECON 115 seat neighbor all turned out to be best friends with each other and let me join their Murray friend group despite my JE roots.

Yale — and I suppose life, but I’ll stick to what I know — has been a series of accidents for me. While some people will come in and grind out that major they’ve dreamed of since they were 11 years old, others, like myself, will change their minds each year as different classes reshape their passions. While some already know that their participation in the Yale Undergraduate Consulting Group and Yale Student Investment Group will propel them to great heights, others are happy to be peer pressured into joining extracurriculars by their FOOT leaders.

Over time, most of us will find our way to the right place — or at least a good one — for our academics and extracurriculars. Socially, however, we don’t have such control. In a class of nearly 1,800, even the most extroverted extrovert isn’t meeting everyone, no matter how hard I’ve tried.

Despite attending every duty night as a freshman, camping out in the dining hall for hours on end, playing intramural sports and hanging out in the courtyard, I showed up to our JE 2025 class meeting last week and still didn’t recognize about a quarter of my peers. 

With some people, it might be inevitable that you will become best friends or mortal enemies. But the far more likely scenario is that randomness will make those decisions for us. 

We still have the agency to decide which relationships to nip in the bud and which to nourish. Our own willingness to put ourselves out there also plays a large role. But if and when a specific friendship begins… that’s beyond our control. 

I think I saw Stacey the other day, although I can’t be a hundred percent sure. Part of me wanted to follow up on that meal, if only for a more poetic ending to this story. I didn’t, though. She definitely didn’t recognize me either. And I guess we never will get that meal.