Zahra Virani

I booked the train to Liverpool to see my friend on a whim. A few months ago, we barely knew each other — just two people trading quick jokes and half-formed plans, attending first-year college council meetings once a week. And yet, that was enough to land me here, stepping off the train in the dead of night, rain soaking through my jacket, grinning at the madness of it all.

Matty and I wandered through the Christmas market first — weaving between stalls glowing with lights and the smell of sugared almonds. Liverpool unraveled before us, bleeding neon with pounding bass and storm-wet streets. We slipped on cobblestones, then danced through six nightclubs — each one louder, wilder than the last. We drank a whole bottle of wine, our cheeks flushed, talked of New Year hopes, and then sprinted through the streets, rain slashing sideways, breathless with laughter. “This is crazy. Liverpool, of all places,” we kept saying to each other, hysterical, because what else was there to do but revel in it? Long live Liverpool and the friendships that arrive like a tour de force — sudden and unstoppable, full of ridiculous joy — full of nights that stretch too far and end too soon.

– Baala Shakya  

“29, 30, 31, 33.” 

I was eight. My older sister had counted all 33 of the little gummy bears she had left in her candy jar before leaving, and she had warned me that they all better be there when she returned. As she counted, I prayed for another little bear to magically appear. It didn’t, but she did seem to magically forget the number 32. 

I was 14. My sister had just returned, fresh from her first year at Berkeley. She was rifling through her closet looking for her leather jacket; I sat on her bed — her hangers looked all too bare in the daylight. Her sweaters had long since migrated to my room, against her strict commands before departure. However, she didn’t seem to notice, not even when she ran into me wearing her Abercrombie jacket two days later. 

Love is all the things that my sister mysteriously loses and somehow never remembers to find. 

I am 19. We live 3,000 miles apart. Last week, I received a bag containing some clothes she had agreed to lend to me. At the bottom was an extra sweater. I wear it nearly every day — she never mentioned giving it to me. 

– Vidhi Bhartiya

My dad’s 50th birthday had been planned since I started watching Manchester United games with him at the ripe age of seven. Just him and I, at Old Trafford, donned head to toe in red, screaming ourselves hoarse. It was the highlight of my life and I hadn’t even lived it yet.

He died two years, one month, and one day before he hit his half-century. I fought back tears while watching soccer. I dismissed holiday plans my mum eagerly proposed for us. I stopped sleeping. 

For what would have been his 50th year, my mum surprised me with Manchester derby tickets. I dreaded the trip. 

But, being at Old Trafford felt like a fitting celebration of the day my favorite person first graced the planet. My mum went above and beyond to make that evening about him and I. She learned the names and positions of each player. She held my hand firmly in hers through the 90 minutes, and screamed louder than me when we won. 

In the dizzying high of victory, I knew no one else would ever love me like this. That night, I slept like I hadn’t in two years, one month, and one day.

– Alina Vaidya Mahadevan

Last summer, my best friend and I were stranded in the middle of Spain. We’d been hiking for the past week. Between our raw feet and no shower in god knows how long, we were eager to end the “roughing it” portion of the trip. Over the incessant din of birds cawing on the platform, I could hear her repeating, “No autobús! No autobús!” to the station attendant in her broken high-school-level Spanish, trying in vain to convey that we wanted a train across the country, not a bumpy six-hour bus ride.

Somehow, we eventually boarded a train headed loosely towards our destination. We sat there silently, too tired to do anything except look out the window. As we slowly slunk our way through the endless fields of wheat, the opening guitar riff of “Yellow” by Coldplay began in my headphones. I looked over at my best friend, slumped in slumber over her pack, and felt overwhelmingly lucky to have found her. It’s memories like these, steeped in the baking Galician sun and love for someone who feels like the other half of my soul, that keep me warm on the coldest of Connecticut nights.

– Grace Malko

I’ve loved you since you were blonde. Two years of quarantine made most people forget what you used to look like, with your eyebrows paler than your skin and freckles hidden beneath the concealer. In eighth grade you crossed that gap from blonde to strawberry to cherry with box die and a sweatshirt you streaked with red. You smeared clumps of Manic Panic on the hair behind your ears and on your eyebrows too: red bombshell, red hot, rock ‘n roll red. When you won prom queen, you were redheaded royalty — strands of curling-ironed hair licking up from your tiara — but I’d revered you since the beginning.

Back then, we would stay out at the park until all the lights went out. I had my first sip of vodka there with you, mixed in with a 7-Eleven slushy. We looked so different then, before the beachside bonfires, backyard parties, graduation dinners and departures from the Los Angeles International Airport. Little things remind me of you now, flashes of red dye seeping through crowded parties and Connecticut strip malls.

– Julian Raymond