This piece is meant for my community at Binghamton — you are endless wells of possibility. I write in hope that you never let the world tear you from the desire to know a stranger’s soul, the curiosity of feeling something new, your childhood dreams. 

Every day I’m here and every day that passes by, I think about separation and loss. Now that we don’t live on campus, I think about the impermanence of the faces that were at one point so constant around me — those hallway buddies you never even ever spoke to but knew because you were both always late for that one class. I go to class now, and I like to watch people and think of who they just might be. I imagine them living the beautiful parts of my experience in a way that’s just recognizable enough, in a world that I’ll never be able to comprehend even if I knew everything about it.

I sit alone in CIW dining hall after class and see a group of girls eating together, and I smile and think of my first meal with my housemates. I reminisce about these old stomping grounds without memory — I feel without thinking. When I say I think of all these people around me, I do so in terms of me and you and everything we ever did, experienced or could feel. And though these different universes around me will never fit into the hollowness of my heart, knowing that theirs at least might beat the same is simply enough to fill it just the same.

Some of your faces I see as a brother and cannot even begin to imagine college life without. Then there are those of you whose minds in this most ineffable, conscious way reflect mine so uniquely that there is a certain magnetism despite every difference, every flaw, between us. There are others, those I’ve always admired and, at times, yearned to truly know. But we’ve already met each other, so it’s easier not to daydream of a night when we’re walking alone through campus, laughter roaring in the dead of the night. You’re people I’ve wanted to learn from, people I’ve wanted to kiss, people I’ve wanted to hug and promise better things. I remember those sleepless teenage nights when I dreamed of meeting you.

It’s cruel to let me be around you with my soul unable to know yours, your fences locking me out because the world you exist in forces you to. Then again, we adapt to pick up on the cruelty of it all, to think, isn’t it all fucking-A if we stay apart? So I do what you do and my eyes blink away all your faces into a blur. Into concepts and tropes and ideas and all other sorts of clearly defined bullshit categories; self-isolating intellectualizations. They eventually only assure me of the great irony that even my deepest emotions are meaninglessly impermanent.

When I dream with my eyes open, about us and every emotion our lives together could ever evoke, it is an infinity so small. One that is just enough for me to feel so intensely about so much all the time, and then choose to continue to look away and get on with my day. It is a palette with the colors so liminal, so complex, yet so impotent to capture what really is, so that to sit down to paint would be to let life run over me and speed off into the distance. My world is and has always been you. I have never been in my life. I can’t sit to paint. But from time to time, the blinking turns to tears, and I remember.

What do I have but you? The soul that I met and got to know in whatever capacity in a time of my life where I’m expected to put my feelings on a shelf, preserved for a perfect partner or a close friend to pick up in the correct moment, just so we can both begin to get to know me. Every lovable part of me is what we made “me,” whatever little fleeting moment your souls knew mine, every word you said, every smile you asked for, every boyhood dream of mine you fulfilled. It’s me and you. I love you.

Why shouldn’t I crumble beneath the profundity of just how beautiful the fact we ever shook hands is? Why shouldn’t I write to you in abstractions and bare my heart praying for your familiarity? Why shouldn’t I tell you that I have thought your thoughts, that I know? That nothing that you could say to me will scare me from you, because unlike the world, all that I ever wanted from you was your affection?

With all the pain my heart can take and the contagious joy that my brittle soul can muster, this is a love letter to you, oh friend, you’re my favorite stranger.

Armaan Rizvi is a junior triple-majoring in political science, anthropology and history. He is the president of the Binghamton Law Quarterly and has previously served as social vice president of College-in-the-Woods. 

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