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Where Love Takes Flight
The story of Shealyn and Tristan
This is the tale of our love. It spans years and continents and is epic in proportion. Read on, but be warned, you may weep, and you almost certainly shall laugh...
It was August 2019 and Shealyn had just arrived at Cornell, full of hope and wonder. As fate would have it, one evening, she was playing piano in the common area of the dorm she would soon find out housed a rather wild-looking man. As the golden-hour sun drenched the room, a young man, whose hair looked like it had been neither brushed nor cut in eight months, walked into the building. Instantly, he was dazzled by the lass in pajamas hunched over the ivories. Several weeks went by without a word shared, but every time Shealyn would sit down at that piano, the young man mysteriously appeared, sat, and listened.
It was Tristan. Before he learned what conditioner was.
Eventually, names were exchanged, and an almost instant friendship was formed. As the months passed, Shealyn introduced Tristan to plant biology, apple cider, the Ithaca Bakery, and the Friends of the Library Booksale. Tristan tried valiantly to teach her the call of a Red-bellied Woodpecker. Shealyn claimed she could hear it. She couldn't. When they were sent home in the spring of 2020, Shealyn wrote letters, filled with jokes and encouragement. Tristan never wrote back. Somehow, the friendship survived until the summer when they found themselves back in Ithaca for summer internships. What comes next might be considered excessive to some. Nearly every day after work, the two friends would meet up and eat ice cream and spaghetti and take a walk to look at trees and birds, which Shealyn could finally identify. Once, they found a dead fish and took photos with it.
As the years went by, the friendship was strengthened in the fires of Cornell. Other friendships came and went, but nothing could separate the two from their weekly facemasks and Danish Butter Cookies. Sunday mornings found the pair at the Cornell compost piles looking for shorebirds en route to church, while Sunday afternoons saw one or the other drooling into the couch in Shealyn's apartment. Gallons of tea were consumed together until one tragic day in May 2022 when Tristan left the country. Shealyn departed for Florida the following week. There she wrote letters, filled with anecdotes and prayers. Tristan never wrote back. He did, however, visit. Several times. It is also important to note that he kept Shealyn's extensive plant collection alive and well with a few minor, yet heartbreaking, exceptions.
And so we come to the present day, where Shealyn makes kimchi and Tristan eats kimchi and decides that the end of a long, kimchi-making day is the perfect time to ask his best friend to be his wife...
