yalie

LINK: yalie

In my drafts since March 21, 2025.

Flashback to when I was attending uni and living in my own little apartment, when I stumbled across him on a Korean forum (it’s like Reddit but solely Koreans).

His username was boring. Yalie. I thought that it was rather pretentious because he was announcing to the world that he was a Yale student. But then again, he did earn it. Eugene was a Yale Law student from California and boy, was he the quintessential textbook definition of a Korean nerd: wire-rimmed glasses, preppy, sharp mind, respectful to his parents, and excelled academically in basically everything. Did I also tell you that he played tennis? At this time, I was in my nerdy AF era.

We started DMing and then took it offline shortly after. Our conversations flowed organically and he offered to fly me out to California to go visit him during spring break but I declined because I had to study and I had a ridiculous amount of homework that I needed to plow through. Instead, he offered to fly out to Minneapolis to spend the week with me. He promised not to disturb me and help me study. I said yes before I could overthink it.

The moment we met at the airport, I realized we were almost the same height. It occurred to me that I never asked him how tall he was. I was just going off pure vibes whenever we texted and failed to ask him a lot of basic questions. It was slightly awkward picking him up at the airport, only because I wore four inch heels and I was towering over him. He just laughed and stared at my legs. “They look like they go on forever”, as he pointed to my gams. Needless to say, he wasn’t self-conscious at all about being a short king.

He handed me a Yale baseball cap he’d brought as a gift. Of course he did. I offered to get him a UMN cap but he declined. Hmph.

That week we spent together was magic.

He doted on me without being overbearing. He was very attentive to my needs and had a gentle demeanor. While I was buried in textbooks, he’d quietly appear behind me placing his warm hands on my shoulder, giving me neck massages. He drew my baths, washed my hair, and picked out my fits because I never know what to wear. I cooked for us Korean meals every night, that way we could save money and maximize the amount of time we had together.

If I’m being honest though, I suspect that he came from money and wasn’t on a budget like I was, but he never flaunted it. After we ate, we’d take long walks around the frozen lake, fingers laced, and talked about the future and our goals. I thought it was nice that he always wanted to hold my hand.

When we returned to the apartment, he would quiz me on organic chemistry and pathophysiology to ensure that I’ve remembered the material I read earlier. At night, we’d crawl under the covers and he’d tell me stories about his family till I fell asleep.

After a week, he flew back to Connecticut and I returned back to my lectures and labs on campus. We tried to keep the spark alive long-distance, but life seemed to have other plans for us. We were being pulled into different directions. We were both ambitious, chasing our future, and a long-distance relationship didn’t seem feasible. We became so busy with our schooling that we eventually stopped messaging altogether.

Still… it was good while it lasted. Le sigh.

A couple of years later, when I finally moved back to California, I thought about reaching out to him and reconnecting. But I realized that some chapters are meant to stay exactly where they belong… in the past.