An unlikely friendship: Reflections on a Princeton pairing

We shouldn’t be friends. We shouldn’t be friends because you’re asleep every night by 11 p.m. and because we can never hang out after precept ends at 4:20 p.m. We shouldn’t be friends because you disappear on the weekends and always eat dinner later than I do, and if I do run into you during a meal you’re sitting with your family, and I get intimidated by your collective post-workout glow and hide in one of the loner spots in the corner of the dining hall. We shouldn’t be friends because of the festering resentment I should have cultivated toward you by now, considering how you muster the discipline to do probably 45 percent more of the reading for class than I do. We shouldn’t just not be friends — I should probably hate you. Because you might be smarter than me, and maybe even more athletic than I am, though I’m not exactly sure of that because you disappear for chunks of time and come back sweaty, and I have no real reason to be convinced of what you do during that time.

But we’ve overcome a lot, you and I, and, against the odds that this sometimes not-so-mixed-up world has stacked up against us, you are my friend. My best — and only — student-athlete friend. I remember the first time I saw you, stumbling into lecture late on the first day of school. I can admit to you now that I judged you a little bit for your late entrance, and a lot for your first-day-of-school outfit consisting entirely of Princeton athletic gear. On a whim one day, we exchanged phone numbers and made plans to “get coffee.” God knows why we did that. I know now that you don’t drink coffee (Your body is some sort of sacred temple. I can’t imagine much of my existence at Princeton being contingent upon my fitness; I live in Whitman and only encounter Dillon because I have to pass it in order to get anywhere that isn’t the Wa — where I go often to eat disgusting things. You also don’t smoke hookah or even drink that much. Remind me why I think you’re fun?). You flaked on that coffee date because you “fell asleep in jstreet ... tradish” (Yes, I am re-reading our text history to find primary sources for our origin story). The date of this text is Oct. 23. I remember having no idea what “jstreet” was at the time. You were a mystery to me.

Months later, we started studying together for our final during reading week, and you started to win me over, especially when you helped rationalize my choice to take a mental health day with this neat sports analogy: “If you work when you’re not feeling it, you don’t absorb anything. It’s like running on a stress fracture — it doesn’t get you anywhere.” I really liked that analogy, especially the emphatic dash in the second sentence. You sometimes impress me with these instances of articulate wit. Is that because I had lower expectations of you because you’re an athlete (Cue the angry commenters, hands ready to pounce on their keyboards.)? No! Of course not. You even do these endearing self-deprecating shticks: “Sorry, I’m in dumb athlete mode,” or “I need a brain #scarecrow.” It’s cute but probably unhealthy for your self-esteem. Maybe we should talk about it. Later.

And so, we’ve come a long way. I’ve had you over to my house for dinner with our one mutual friend, and we played “tummy giggle haha” with my baby cousins. You’ve invited us to dinner with some of your teammates, and I mooched off of them for Cottage passes that one time. And Cap passes that other time. It’s a symbiotic relationship where I give you Indian food and children to play with, and you help me out with social connections that I don’t have because I’m an unaffiliated loser. Sorry, the self-deprecation is contagious.

We might just have a future together. Maybe one day I’ll come see you run or you’ll come to an orchestra concert. Maybe I’ll meet your real family — though you definitely spend more time with the version that I met. Maybe in our upperclassmen years we’ll escape to Spelman and self-deprecate while our friends do other things. Maybe one day we’ll have more than one mutual friend. Maybe. In the mean time, keep sweating, reading and penciling in time for our unlikely friendship.