Where Am I, and Where Are You?

by Grace Pappadellis ’29 on January 29, 2026

Opinion - Entertainment & Society

My best friend from back home will forever be my best friend from back home. When we are married with children, have moved away to where we’ve always dreamed of living, and have filled our households with homemade meals our mothers taught us to cook, artwork obtained throughout our travels, and beloved albeit deteriorating furniture from our first apartments, she will still be my best friend from home. I will look at her across the dining room table, adorned with flowers from the garden and a lambent glow from candlelight, and I will see her running through the backyard of my childhood home in her bathing suit, sunburnt and covered in grass. I will see her wrapped in a sleeping bag with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, the Christmas lights strung along the ceiling of my basement dangling over us. I will see her on prom night, our senior year, winding light pink ribbon around my bouquet of flowers that had disbanded in the pouring rain. My heart will ache with love for her, adoration, and the scent of her—fresh-picked lavender and faint incense—will pull me back home, to where we grew up, together, all at once.

It is an extreme challenge to separate people from places, faces from memories. You can separate yourself, move away, begin a new period of your life, but those connections—the scents that trigger emotions, the songs that remind you of specific people, and even a mere mention of a saying you used to hear all the time—they’re irremovable. As people—especially observant, empathetic people—we commonly practice making associations between feelings and places, usually related to a person you have vivid memories with. Regardless of where I am, or how long it has been since I’ve been back home, I will always remember the smallest things—what some might call the most trivial details—about people, and it doesn’t take much to remind me. The soft veil of sunlight over the tops of the trees, perceptible through the hallway window, brings me back to long hikes in early spring, obscure places with my family, being young and dragging my feet, but I was always gaining something. The air always felt light and delicate in my lungs; my brother’s lapis blue down jacket kept me warm, never letting me down. My brother and I would make crude jokes as we leaped over the roots of trees and skidded across wooden bridges over rippling creeks. We’d watched too much Cartoon Network, and our humor was infused with the clever yet slightly inappropriate humor of The Amazing World of Gumball. One memory trickles into another, and before I know it I am a little kid again, hiking, sledding, dancing to Lady Gaga, or eating hot dogs in the tiny shop I had no idea I’d work in one day.

No matter where you are, you are with all the people you’ve ever met. Your new friends may share the same smile lines as your oldest friend, or a guttural laugh similar to your father’s. Your ex that occasionally crosses your mind may appear within a restaurant menu or scribed in the lines of a new book, words they once said, or phrases you’ll never forget. Sometimes these reminders are like whispers, a gentle call to memory, growing latent in the back of your mind. Other times, the memories rattle your brain. They are rapturous, or miserable, or so overwhelming they are indistinguishable. Regardless, you’ll never shake people from your life. Your memories may become less fervent, less relevant to the time, but one way or another, you leave a mark on everyone you meet, and they’ve left something for you.

It is imperative that you stay in touch with those who are in different places; the ones you have inevitably separated from, yet they remain just as important to who you are. People make up each other—I have learned things from my childhood best friend that I’ll never learn from anyone else, created irreplaceable memories with new friends, and been loved by my family in a way no one else ever could. No matter where I am, I will remind myself of where you are, and when I’m unsure, I’ll let my memories guide me to you.

To Friends of the Past

by Mariela Flores '23 on September 8, 2022
Portfolio Staff

Portfolio

two children hugging — photo creds: pixabay

You were so special. Like a beam of something good sitting next to me in every classroom, every space, every inch of the world as if we owned the air that we breathed in.

You were so good to me. With words that wrapped me up warmly, just like a hug. With belly laughter that only you knew the sound of. With talking about futures neither of us knew how we would get a hold of––I sit here somewhere that feels too much like the past, waiting to know if you are close to your future. I hope you are well.

I hate mourning you while you are still alive, living a life I thought I’d be a part of. I hate watching you grow from afar––I try to reach into the pixels and write something good, something clever, algo bonito. It doesn’t matter anymore. I know that.

I’m not angry, I’m not even sad, you’ve let time fill that wound with new laughs, new people, new warmth, new futures, new stories. Still, I miss you.

I wish you would have let me know it was the end of us. The end of catch ups in between brand new classes, brand new people, brand new lives.

But you will fade into my memory, like a dream you wake up from after a deep sleep. You will fade like the friends before you and the ones who’ve come after.

I think of you now and then, you’re like an echo in the air, you’re only with me briefly.

I just hope you are well. I miss you, and I just hope you are well.

Smoking is a Bourgeois Concept

by The Cowl Editor on September 30, 2021

Portfolio

two hands holding cigarettes — Photo courtesy of pixabay.com

by Taylor Maguire ’24

Snow wrapped Manhattan in a thick blanket of white. Floating flakes latched onto my brown coat as I walked across the street to Fifth Avenue. The coat belonged to my Aunt Esma whose unique eye color I inherited. Walker, a ghost from my past, once described my eyes as the color of a pond being struck by lightning, although government officials simply recognized them as the color blue on my identification forms. Walker and I met for the first time sophomore year of high school on the day of Thanksgiving in Central Park. A place that collected pieces of my scraped knees and strangers’ cigarette buds. A place where you could hear the echoing music from ice cream machines and the faint cries of irritated and sweaty children coming from every direction.

I don’t remember why, but I was angry the day that we met. I stole my father’s pack of Camel Lights in a moment of retaliation, and left the house before my Aunt Esma arrived with the turkey. Wide-eyed tourists waiting for the parade clogged up crosswalks, and fallen leaves buried the streets in a sea of gold. Believing I had escaped the suffocation of people, I had just begun to light a cigarette when a voice startled me by the park’s Alice in Wonderland Statue, saying,

“Smoking is a bourgeois concept made up by the government in order to control the population, so therefore I cannot support this vice of yours.”

Up until then, Walker was a walking myth to me at school. One that occasionally sported sprinkles of acne along his forehead, and had a poor attendance in anatomy class. The thing about Walker was that he was pigeonholed to his mother’s image, and everyone feared him. He ate alone at lunch, but was smothered at Upper East Side parties by the knockoff Marilyn Monroes of our grade. Walker had brown locks of curls with matching doe eyes. He wore forest green converse and oversized navy blue crewnecks.

“When I smoke I feel like a character from Slyvia Plath’s imagination,” I replied back.

“Didn’t she kill herself?” Walker retorted.

“She stuck her head in an oven,” I replied dryly.

The comforting hands of our high school seemed to weave us together after that encounter. The friendship continued to grow after he sat next to me in Dr. Sabol’s English class. We spent summers together sleeping on twin mattresses at his beach house, arms and legs mangled under goose feather duvets. We peeled sunburned skin off each other’s backs, and swapped secrets as if they were the rarest form of currency.

When the Thanksgiving of our senior year arrived, Walker had bought us a pack of cigarettes at a nearby bodega and took me to the Great Lawn.

“You never smoke,” I said to him that day.

“No, but this is a special day because this is the day where we discover which college will be taking you away from me.” He said it quite seriously. The only thing I could do was let him light the cigarette that dangled from my lips.

“I’m not going anywhere. We’ll stay friends while we’re at school. Did you decide where you wanted to go to college?” I replied.

“Oh please, don’t act coy. My mother’s life plan for me is very limited. Starts with me attending one of the Ivy Leagues and ends with me living amongst the people who worship their mundane jobs, their towheaded children, and their Toyotas with extra gas mileage,” he said spitefully.

“You don’t have to do any of that, you know,” I reminded him. He lit his own cigarette and looked back at me.

“It’s easier said than done. Your accomplishments stem from your very own elbow grease. Mine are mirrored by my family’s name. I’m merely a shadow of their achievements.” Neither of us spoke more about the subject that day. Walker slipped in and out of my life much like a feral cat who invades every home it charms its way into. We wrote letters to each other for a while, but soon I stopped seeing my name written in his handwriting on baby blue envelopes. I forgot about him completely until I saw his mother’s name in the newspaper last week under the obituary section. His photograph was projected right beside it, where he stood beside his towheaded children who he mentioned with such contempt years before. He has wrinkles now, his bright doe eyes have become jaded, and his mounds of brown curls include waves of gray.

I light a Camel Light now, walking by the Alice in Wonderland statue while Lewis Carroll’s characters continue to be buried under spools of snow. The park suddenly falls into a deep silence as the landmarks of my childhood freeze over.