and Words
Saying I love you
Is not the words I want to hear from you
It’s not that I want to
Not to say, but if you only knew
How easy it would be to show me how you feel
More than words
Is all you have to do to make it real
Then you wouldn’t have to say that you love me
‘Cause I’d already know
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
It is 1991 at the University of Miami. This is my fifth year to get two bachelor’s degrees, one in computer science and one in engineering. The school charges the same tuition rate for all full-time students (between twelve and eighteen credits). In order to maximize my tuition money, I would load up on as many classes as I could. Therefore, it has been four straight years of seventeen credit semesters; that’s at least five classes. Then upon finishing classes on Fridays, it is waiting on tables on weekend evenings, that is Friday through Sunday. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Only on this final year do I ease my foot off the figurative accelerator, but only because I only needed a handful of classes to finish my degrees (and my psychology minor). It is finally my last semester, and all I have left to do is my senior project. I consequently spend countless hours in the VLSI lab on the fifth floor of the Engineering building. It’s a tiny lab with two terminals each with digitizers. This was my second home for weeks.
First, I have the design in my head of what I need to build, in my case a floating-point adder circuit. It all makes sense; mentally all the pieces fit together. Second, I just need to actually build them. Time is swiftly running out, I’m due to start work at Microsoft in July. This is the final push, the light at the end of the education tunnel. My days are filled with laying out P and N regions to build transistors, combining those to build larger circuits, and then simulating these to verify that it all works.
Day after day this is my routine. I am therefore exhausted. I simply walk in each day and continue to lay out circuit, put together logical modules. It became a blur, and I was on autopilot. I don’t know how I maintained the pace.
One morning friends stop by and mentioned that they were going for lunch and insisted that I join them. I first reason that I had to eat. I next grab my backpack and follow them. Honestly, I don’t remember what I had for lunch most days; I just remember that this day would be different. There are four of us, two women and two men. And truthfully, I had a crush on one of my friends; this is likely the biggest reason why I agreed.
There were four of us. We were four friends who spend countless hours together; that was undeniable. Did it ever pass that threshold of friendship into fondness or even affection? Into, dare I say, romance? Do we dare say anything as our futures are about to send us scattered into different places? It could be that we instinctively knew that how one of us felt was not reciprocated. Perhaps none of us worked up the courage to finally say it out loud. Maybe it was that each of us, as future engineers, was too practical.
We talk about having an escapade, and truthfully, we didn’t know precisely what we’d end up doing, only that we’d be doing it together. There is a tri-rail station on the far side of campus; this is our first destination. It’s a monorail that runs through parts of the city. This is the start to our grand adventure; we get on the train and disembark.
This is my first time riding this monorail and don’t know where we’re going. It was just “lunch”. I just follow my friends; it’s about the company, not the destination. We eventually end up at Bayside. It’s a great collection of shops and restaurants. We initially wander around looking into each store and spending time together. We eventually sit down at a restaurant and order lunch. Though it was innocently four friends simply having lunch, it felt like a double date. We talked and laughed as we ate our meals, spending money at a touristy restaurant that we couldn’t really afford. I may even say that we flirted, in our collective geeky and awkward ways.
After lunch we stop for a moment and looked over the water. Meanwhile the wind blows in from the Atlantic. It carries the scent from the sea that is unmistakable; one that centers your mind into pictures of calm beaches and palm trees. As it passes warmly over my skin it feels like an embrace, one that almost beacons me to say indefinitely. I don’t remember how long we stand there quietly, but it feels like a long time. For perhaps the first time, I realize that I will be leaving South Florida which has been my home. Finally, in a swift moment, I mourn the loss of leaving this tropical paradise.
I don’t remember how long our little adventure took, but it was just what I needed. We figuratively pressed the ‘pause’ button on a speeding locomotive. We managed to take a fraction of a day and set it aside to preserve it. It is the time equivalent of capturing a scene in a snow globe. I don’t member what we ate that day, nor do I remember what we even talked about. I remember the four of us looking over the water quietly and knowing that this is a moment that I’d always treasure.
Abruptly, real life catches up; we return to our studies in the way that we arrived. Just like that, this fragile moment dissipates as if it never occurred. Sometimes I wonder if it ever did.
Through that last semester this song permeated those moments. At first, I played it so frequently that I nearly burned a hole on that disc. There was one radio in the adjacent lab, separated only by a bookshelf; there was also one of the main classrooms just a few doors away. Similarly, each time it came on the radio, I would turn the volume up. I’ll admit with even some embarrassment that there were even a couple of instances where professors wandered into the lab asking us to turn it down, once it was even during an exam. 😄
This song became synonymous with that set of friends. Naturally, we had a vast collection of memorable moments. Most overwhelmingly good, some bad. As I graduated and knew that I’d be starting a new life clear across the country, it felt as if it was leaving a part of me behind.
This song brings me to that quiet moment overlooking the water at Bayside and those sets of friends from that era. In that moment, our friendship and our affection for each other was almost tangible. They were indeed more than words.