“And I couldn’t remember the last time someone had said they’d missed me.”

That’s funny. Yeah, I actually wrote in my journal in spring two thousand nineteen in April that a certain person had been my sunshine on a rainy day, and that person was actually a professor of mine and she has consistently been this way for me, so it’s not an isolated incident. But one of the things I loved about going to a smaller school is that you get to know your professors quite personally sometimes, and that was the case here. And so, this professor was, um, she was away at a conference for a week or so, actually in Europe, and then she came back, and I was sitting at this little study table, um, doing philosophy homework, I think I was reading Descartes, and I felt like this touch on my shoulder, and I turn around, and there she was. She still had her hand on my purple raincoat, and she says, “Oh, I missed you last week.” And I couldn’t remember the last time someone had said they’d missed me, probably except my grandma. I don’t think I’d ever really been missed before in my life. And that touched my whole day. It was raining outside and I was struggling because the end of the school year was coming and I didn’t want to move back home for the summer. And that made my whole day. When I went back to my dorm room, it made me cry, actually, as I was writing it down in my journal. And she, like I said, we’ve maintained a close friendship even after I was in her class, and it’s been that way. So many times I’ve stopped by and she’s had, like, the perfect advice for me, or sometimes she tells me just to open up my backpack because she has chocolates for me, that’s happened before too. And keeping in touch during a pandemic over email, that really kept me going a lot of times. I might receive a message I wasn’t expecting, and it would be one of the hardest days or something, and you, it just gives you strength to move forward and not only watch television all day, which was, of course, a temptation a lot of people faced.