LOVE BITES: TROUBADOURS AND TOBLERONES
To give a gift—whether it is a customized crossword puzzle, a serpentine necklace, or a simple commitment to walking together—is to initiate, deepen, or open up a relationship in powerful ways. For this issue of Love Bites, each contributor tells us about a particularly memorable gift they’ve received. In a world of fast cars and even faster company, perhaps it is by dwelling on these moments of loving, meaningful exchange that we can begin to truly appreciate the people with whom we are gifted.
Bestie Bug
Before I met her, I’d forgotten how wonderful the world could be. I spent the year prior locked inside of my home, hiding fearfully from the sickness and germs of what seemed to be a new Covid variant every week. The world’s mundane routine of disaster left no room for beauty, spontaneity, or surprise. A year later, I found myself in college trying to figure out who I was, and who I was going to love, and who was going to love me. And then, like magic, or the song of a bird, the whistle of a small child, a fluid motion happening miraculously and naturally all at once, she seemed to come from thin air, and I am so lucky. I will always cherish the walks from my dorm to hers when I was nineteen. Each time I arrived at the front of her steps, she’d run and smile and dance her way to the door. This became my favorite ritual. With her, mundane routines are exhilarating and I become brave in every frightening moment. I used to sneer at those who said that friendship is the greatest gift of all. I mean, how cliché, right? But there’s no object for which I’d sacrifice the sound of her teenage footsteps crashing down the stairs on their way to me, or the sound of her voice through the delicate paneling of the Wayland Arch each day as the door opened: I missed you, how are you?
— Anonymous
Down for a Cross
My boyfriend and I started dating in the fall of 2020. That winter break, excited by the newness of our relationship yet experiencing long distance for the first time, we video-called, Netflix partied, and completed crossword puzzles together online. The following fall, for his birthday, I stayed up, jet-lagged from my first night back on the East Coast, and spent several hours on google sheets making him a customized crossword puzzle. The answers included my name, his friend's name, music he likes (Taylor Swift), and where we fell in love. He solved the puzzle at his birthday dinner in a couple minutes.
— Ingrid Ren
Untitled
In tenth grade and barely formed, Terry and I were seeing each other. He was always curious to me, especially after that oddly erotic poem he wrote, titled “Forbidden Fruit,” on the yellow rinds of lemons and their pungent scents. Communication between us was infrequent and he, flakey, yet I attributed these to his allure. Being my first object of idealization, he extinguished my indignant words every time I saw him. (He had also lied to me about Neil Tennant being his uncle and, for that, I often feared that I was an object of ridicule to him.)
He came back from an autumn in Venice and, upon our reunion, I traveled up the dorm steps to his room which—as I still vividly remember—contained a precarious branch within its walls, touching floor to ceiling.
As I stood in front of the mirror, lit by those terrible neon rave lights that pervaded campus, I relished the image of him moving behind me and before me in reflection, like I was an older, sophisticated woman with a body of my own—the stuff of films. Enfolding me, then lifting his hands off my neck, he laid upon my chest a dense, black glass of a snake, with gold tendrils afloat: a token of Terry’s admiration!
I let out a deep breath; it was a Valentine’s Day void of hearts and scrawled initials, but this physical keepsake convinced me that he wasn’t a phony imagination of a crush after all.
— Anaïs Shen
LOVE BITES EDITOR: Andrew Lu is a junior at Brown. He is very frazzled and looking for the scarf to match.
ARTIST: Mindy Ji is a third year at Brown. She is an American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and director. She first gained recognition starring as Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom The Office, for which she also served as a writer, executive producer, and director.