It’s day 10 of self-quarantine, and I’ll say it — I miss my boyfriend.
As someone who sees herself as a relatively independent, somewhat stable person, this feeling surprises me. I never thought I’d be one of those girls — you know, the ones that miss their boyfriends. It’s almost like I enjoy spending time with him. Insanity.
“Missing my boyfriend” is a microcosmic problem to have in terms of the situation imploding around us globally. I have a lot to be thankful for — I have a roof over my head, access to food, and am not immunocompromised. Tell myself this as I may, the feeling remains. I can’t help but feel robbed of the time I assumed we’d have together before the semester ended. Now, with us both attending Zoom University and being 1,928.1 miles apart, this chapter of my life has drawn to a close all too suddenly. It is strangely painful.
So, day 10. It’s not that I have spent an exorbitant amount of time apart from him thus far. Winter break was four weeks long and I was fine, happily floating through the holidays with the occasional phone call. But it is the indefinite nature of this time that upsets me. I don’t like not knowing how long this will last, if I will see him in three weeks or three months or a year. It’s unsettling.
College creates a surrogate family, the people you live with, depend on, and get ridiculously excited about serendipitously passing on campus. It’s like Sally Rooney writes in Normal People: “No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt…go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.” I underestimated just how much I relied on these college relationships. I have found it extremely difficult to go from seeing someone every single day to not knowing when I will see them next. People are addicting.
Maybe it’s not so much that I miss my boyfriend but that I am mourning the time I thought I’d have in the last months of my sophomore year. The late-night talks with my roommates in the kitchen of my apartment, the always-bizarre Cardinal Gardens kickbacks, the all-nighters forcing me to brave a venture into Leavey. All the memories I had planned on making, now lost time existing in some alternate universe. I say I miss my boyfriend. What I really miss is what should have been.