Year One-and-Done. I think of all the people who simply were there.
For all the people who give a constancy to my life. Kind partners or friendly strangers, people who said Hello.
Awkward conversations, well trodden shallows like sports or how college was going or the weather, people who knew my name at and said it and nothing else. Sometimes that was all it took. If you have a name then you belong.
Greetings in hallways, two-minute chats. The people I only have something to discuss with after a test. How I treasure those.
People who would walk the way I am going. Maybe to the food trucks, maybe as far as the train station. Correlating routes; those precious intersecting minutes of companionship.
How much I owe to frustrating assignments, authoritative professors. The inexhaustible resource of mutual resentment, griping, bemoaning. How irritating it must have been for upperclassmen to listen to. How happy it was to have something to talk about.
The company of open laptops and lunches. Silence broken by farewells and vile conversations that were welcome conversation all the same. Eye contact and a greetings worth more than money. The reassurance of belonging.
And most wonderful of all, the people who made invitations; never gave up asking, never decided that enough initiating was enough. Said hello from awkward distances, asked quiet people for opinions, invited strangers like me.
Each and every person, whether I spent a moment or an hour, I remember. Your faces and your voices come and go in my memory, sometimes they are actors in my dreams. For you, your interactions may have been mundane, routine or natural, and they were. They were so much more, though. For me they meant the world.
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