From classmates to friends to lovers By Mayee Yeh Identity and Equity Editor
Natalia Palacino Camargo
6
My boyfriend and I like to constantly ask one another how we ended up as we did: dating right before finals were in full swing, with what is currently half of our relationship occurring over winter break. But as the linguists we are, I think it would be best to track it through words. Friend He and I are in the same, tiny, 100-person major, so it’s unsurprising that we ended up in two classes together last semester. I saw him four out of five days of the week, even though he preferred to sit at the back of the class and talk to as few people as possible. In the first class, we sat on opposite sides of the room. In the second class, we ended up sitting next to each other and stayed that way through the semester, in accordance with the unspoken seating chart every class seems to have. The first day I sat next to him, he jumped. But after I kept engaging him in our paired class work and reassured him that being confused about the International Phonetic Alphabet was normal, he warmed up to me. I was never one to question his habit of playing Pokémon or Genshin during class. If we ever spoke, I simply asked him what he was doing. Sometimes, I saw him doing Chinese homework
and would attempt to read the characters, which elicited a laugh at how wrong I was. I gave him Haw Flakes — these round, sweet discs of Chinese hawthorn candy, which seemed to completely confuse him. I questioned whether he was eating properly, and always asked him if he needed help with the homework. We didn’t acknowledge that there was possibly something between us that was more than the classic extrovert-adoptsintrovert dynamic until his roommate added an unexpected degree of relation. The roommate and I were also in the same first-year seminar for my other major. We formed the kind of bond that doesn’t necessitate constant communication with each other, but was fortified by a mutual acknowledgement of respect and all-too-similar energy. One day, as he was texting me, his roommate saw my name on his phone. They both relayed their knowledge of me to each other, and with the excitement made from this newfound and unexpected connection, I was quickly being texted from both sources about the discovery. I’d been surprised too, but the only thing I could really think of to text was, “I absolutely adore him.”
