The summer after my freshman year of college, I decided to live in the basement of my school’s library for a few months. I certainly wasn’t the first student to live there, as the university I attended offered little financial support and the rent in Manhattan is skyrocketing.
When I heard that other students had survived a summer without rent by living illegally in the underbelly of the school, I thought this arrangement would be a perfect fit for my flexible summer recruiting job.
And it was. I showered at the gym and squirreled canned food into fire extinguishers. My colleagues made no comments about my limited wardrobe. The security and maintenance staff didn’t seem to like a few students sleeping on couches. When they occasionally chased me away, I would sleep on couches in my friends’ dormitories. In my spare time, I wasted dollar pizza and spent hours reading books at Barnes & Noble.
This life would have gone on without a hitch for the rest of the summer, but it all changed when I found a note in my shoe one morning that read, “You were so beautiful while you were sleeping. Call me.”
Brushing my teeth in the library bathroom, I considered calling the number, disgusted that a stranger had seen me sleeping. I remembered that someone had come into the study lounge the night before while I was settling in, but I hadn’t caught a good glimpse.
You have to be a certain type of eccentric to choose to live in the library. Combine this with the recklessness of the youth, and I decided to call the number.
His accent was British and his voice was dull, as if he’d just woken up. I was rude and demanded that he meet me immediately in front of a nearby park. When he arrived fifteen minutes late, I was already annoyed.
“Your note was creepy and disrespectful,” I said.
He gave me a shy half grin which he covered with his hand and said, “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
He wasn’t my type—an inch shorter than me and self-conscious, yet there was something about him that charmed me as his cheeks moved up and down in amusement. As a Korean international student who had studied in the UK for some time, he admitted to putting an emphasis on fat when he wanted something.
“Is there anything you want now?” I said shyly.
We went back to his damp dorm and listened to music as we lay on his bed. Maybe I wasn’t wary by then, or maybe just because I wanted to – I leaned over and kissed him, then we moved on.
Then he went to the bathroom to wash. I quickly got dressed, made the bed and left without saying goodbye.
That night at work, I told my friends about the note I had received.
“Did you call?” asked the one obsessed with meet-cutes.
“You’ll be killed one day,” said another.
I told them everything except that I had slept with him. Somehow I felt it was embarrassing – an error in my moral judgment.
After work, I got ready for bed, avoiding eye contact with the student who was leaving a bathroom cubicle just as I was spitting my toothpaste foam into the sink. When I got to my usual place to sleep, he was there.
“Why did you leave without saying goodbye?” he said.
None of my previous one-night stands had ever asked why I was leaving after hooking up. No one wanted to sit in the awkwardness of the aftermath.
“I thought it would be rather dangerous for you to stay the night here,” he said. “Why don’t you sleep tonight?”
“It’ll be okay,” I said, but my couch looked particularly sad that night, so I reluctantly agreed. As we rode the elevator to his dorm, he said, “We can just be friends. I just didn’t want you sleeping in the library anymore.’
But when we slept together in a single bed for the next several weeks, we weren’t just friends.
He showed me a different world from my minimal life – we visited art galleries in Chelsea; he taught me how to roll a “ssam” at my first Korean barbecue restaurant; we smoked in his room and chewed chips that we took out of the bag with chopsticks. We went to see an art film, which confused and fascinated me.
“Do you usually watch these kinds of movies?” I asked him. “The ones with a lot of talk and not much action or much of an ending?”
He grinned, much less shy of his teeth now. “Not necessarily, but my friend recommended it. I always try out her recommendations. She is my soul mate.”
soul mate. I turned that word into my mind that night as I slept next to him. What did that mean? I had never really believed in relationships or marriages. Most of my relatives’ marriages struck me as full of unspoken anger. As he and I continued to go out on dates – because they were – I learned more about his soul mate. She was a model, quiet and refined, with long white legs and a trimmed nose.
Maybe my competitiveness was starting to get the better of me, or maybe it was all free meals, but I started to wonder – what would it be like to be someone’s soulmate? I had kept everyone at a distance all my life because I felt I would be judged for revealing my whole self. I was my parents’ high-achieving, obedient daughter; I censored my weird parts from my classmates and my tired, vulnerable parts from my friends. I had never had a best friend.
Instead, I lived through funny anecdotes that I alternated at parties, and so a story started to form in my head here, wryly telling my grandchildren, ‘Do you know where I met your grandfather? Sleeping in a library where he left me a creepy note!”
One blistering night I dreamed of my father, who had died of cancer the previous summer. I woke up confused and crying, and he held me as I put together the aftermath of the dream.
Looking for something to comfort me, he fished out a handkerchief from his drawer, which to me was so old-fashioned it made me laugh through my tears.
“Fine! If you don’t want it, I’ll take it back!” he said, but he wiped my blotchy face. The spinning fan gradually rocked us back to sleep. In his arms I felt safe, and I wondered: maybe this could last forever.
His summer classes then came to an end, after which he returned to Korea to do his military service, and I put my things back in the library vault. Before he left, he told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him too, without really knowing what it meant.
I was in love with the idea of him. It was easy to fall in love with carefully crafted emails, shared playlists, and phone calls that always felt too short. Much easier than falling in love with a real person and hearing about their monotonous days and controversial opinions and learning about their bad habits and nasty tics.
The city was emptying – the first half of my summer job ended and all my work friends left for home, except for one, who asked if I wanted to stay the night where he was staying. I rejected him. I now preferred to sleep in the library and read emails from across the ocean, stay up late and try to cross time zones.
I noticed that the other people who had made the library their home slept on the hard couches late into the night. I ignored these new roommates. It was one thing to joke with your friends about your unconventional living situation; it was another to be so directly confronted with it as you sat down for another late night with your towel drying on a computer chair next to you.
Eventually, our email exchanges petered out, leaving me limp in the heat. In his last email, he wrote: “I’ve had the most fun since landing in New York a year ago. I only started eating out and trying everything New York is famous for because I met you. It’s kind of sad, and I’m trying not to cry now, but I wish we could have met in a few years if we didn’t have to say goodbye so soon. You know how people are always excited about summers and determined to make summers so memorable? I finally have a summer worth remembering.”
Me too.
