before we were strangers by renee carlino

I had come out of the field, where I had seen everything, and I went into a hole, where I saw nothing. It hadn’t felt National or Geographic since I had taken a desk job there a few years before. These are the things I pondered while sitting in my four-by-four cubicle at National Geographic. They had stopped playing music videos on MTV and had banned smoking in bars. Recording studios, film labs, and record stores were dying, if not already vacant corpses turned cupcake shops or blow-dry bars. There were twenty-one Starbucks within a three-block radius of the building I worked in. Don’t even get me started on gentrification. I despised the use of emojis, the word meta, and people who talked on their phones in line. I categorically disagreed with all things current.

Life was passing me by at high speed as I sat back with my feet up, rejecting change, ignoring the world, shrugging off anything that threatened to have meaning or relevance. RECENTLY 1. Do You Still Think of Me? MATT I might be totally out of my mind, but would you like to get a drink with me and catch up on the last decade and a half? I tried to will the train to stop, just so I could say hello.Īfter seeing you, all of the youthful feelings and memories came flooding back to me, and now I’ve spent the better part of a month wondering what your life is like. I didn’t know it was you until it was too late, and then you were gone. You were rocking back on your heels, balancing on that thick yellow line that runs along the subway platform, waiting for the F train. I didn’t see you again until a month ago. A part of me still wonders if I pushed you too hard after the wedding…

We lost touch the summer after graduation when I went to South America to work for National Geographic. I learned more about myself that year than any other. We lived on nothing but the excitement of finding ourselves through music (you were obsessed with Jeff Buckley), photography (I couldn’t stop taking pictures of you), hanging out in Washington Square Park, and all the weird things we did to make money. We met fifteen years ago, almost to the day, when I moved my stuff into the NYU dorm room next to yours at Senior House. From the USA TODAY bestselling author of Sweet Thing and Nowhere But Here comes a love story about a Craigslist “missed connection” post that gives two people a second chance at love fifteen years after they were separated in New York City.

Before we were strangers by renee carlino