The Us We Were Then

Lau Guzmán

Graphic by Elliot Wright

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.” – Patti Smith, Just Kids. 

I expected college in America to be the kiln that fired the mushy clay of my personality into its final, polished shape. No such luck. When NYU shut down the dorms in March of 2020, I returned to live in my parent’s attic in Bogotá. After spending three semesters in New York, I spent most of my college experience in and out of government-mandated quarantine while taking online classes. 

The experience left me feeling brittle, amorphous, cracked, raw. Even now, a month away from graduation, I still feel unfinished, unsophisticated. Maybe I would have felt the same if the pandemic had never happened. But it is impossible to test the counterfactual, so I find myself thinking about who I could have become. 

I am reminded of Pablo Neruda’s “Poem 20,” a self-proclaimed sad boi poem about memory and change. “Nosostros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos,” Neruda writes. He’s right. We, the us we were back then, are no longer the same. Now that I’m back in New York for a final semester, I stumble on traces of the us we were then, but they are so elusive that they are impossible to distinguish from mere nostalgia. 

“So, what’s it like being back?” Misa asks me. We stand on the crowded downtown 1 train, somewhere near Times Square. It’s August of 2021. A box of my stuff lies at our feet. Misa’s from the city and was kind enough to store it for me while I was in Bogotá. It was even kinder of him to help me carry it to my new place. 

“It’s surreal,” I say. “Like, I never expected to come back to New York. I fully expected my stuff to just rot at your place. And then you’d have to deal with a box of my mold.” 

We laugh. I had missed him so much. I had missed all of my New York friends so much. Our friend group used to haunt the Starbucks on West 4th Street. We met between classes, just to pass the time. It was a great place to do homework, converse, confess a crush, cry. We were all struggling, but at least we had a place to sit while we suffered through the vicissitudes of college life. 

“Wanna find out what Disney princess you are?” Misa asked me once. It was late on a nondescript weekday sometime in the prepandemic era. It must have been cold out because his tan coat was thrown over a nearby chair. I attacked a stack of pdf printouts with a green Muji pen. He typed something on his laptop, the glow reflecting dark circles under his eyes and his mop of rumpled, curly black hair. 

“Absolutely,” I said, grinning as I tossed my pen on top of the pdfs with gleeful spite.

He opened Buzzfeed on his phone and we spent the next ten minutes arguing whether a phoenix or a unicorn would be a better mascot. (For the record, the only acceptable answer is a phoenix). 

The Starbucks was always dark and poorly lit inside. Nobody smoked, but the atmosphere still held a yellow haze. My memories of that time are filtered through the same yellow haze. At the Starbucks, the layers upon layers of use covered the tables with a gritty residue. It was rough, but not altogether unpleasant, like the pages of an old paperback. I was in the process of acquiring that texture, too. These people changed my personality. I read the books they read, went to their parties, absorbed their political opinions. 

During the finals season of December 2019, I spent most of the reading day writing final essays in that Starbucks. Around me, seven or eight other piles of homework spread out over the sticky surfaces of the table. We barely moved from our seats, save the miniscule movements to shift places and attach a laptop to the lonely outlet on the wall. My friends would walk in or out to get food, drink coffee, stretch, or go to the bathroom. We would shift to make space or reclaim their abandoned space. 

We kept on working. I edited someone’s paper. Someone edited my paper. Sometime late that night, Patty and Misa went on an ice cream run. They returned from Van Leeuwen’s on MacDougall 15 minutes later with a pint of Honeycomb ice cream and eight spoons. I’ve never tasted better ice cream. 

And so the months slipped by in a series of birthday parties, movie nights, and ice cream runs. We did homework. We landed internships and got bad grades on papers. We went on dates and suffered through breakups. We went places and watched movies. We did more homework. All this living became something that resembled a college experience. Early in March of 2020, we 

sat at Ellen’s Stardust diner to celebrate a birthday. The food was decent, but the singing was great. Around the table, we quipped and laughed, oblivious that we were all about to go our separate ways. 

Zoom didn’t have texture. On zoom, everything was smooth and unidimensional, confined into little neat boxes with curved corners. I would not speak to my classmates outside of a little chat box. My friends were texts I sent into the void. The only ‘real’ people I spoke to were related to me by blood. 

◇◇◇◇

I head into the Starbucks on West 4th. It is still a Starbucks and it is still on West 4th, but it is no longer the Starbucks on West 4th I remember. Fluorescent lights reflect off the gleaming subway tile with all the charm of an industrial bathroom. There is no texture to the place anymore, no grit. I hoped my mask concealed the fact that I was on the verge of tears. It felt wrong. But the world doesn’t stop just because I feel sad about places becoming more sanitary. We’ve all moved on and grown up.

Patty and Misa graduated from NYU in May of 2020. They have jobs now. Patty moved back home to California. They are different people. I’m different, too. I was not an anxious person then. I am now. 

And yet, despite all the changes, I have been blessed to keep Patty and Misa in my life. 

“Omigosh hiiii!” I launched myself at Patty when she came back to visit New York. I gave her an enormous hug. We marshalled our friend group to an Airbnb near Brighton Beach in Queens. Misa drove to a nearby takeout place for food. Of course, we are no longer the same. And yet, sitting around the table with the remains of our meal, I’m reminded of the us we were then.