Amber and Luke met in their first semester of graduate school at the University of Illinois. Amber was continuing her studies from her recently completed bachelor’s degree at UIUC while Luke was fresh in from his move to Illinois from east Tennessee, not knowing a soul and looking to make friends as quickly as possible in a town where it became glaringly apparent there was not much fun to be had on one’s own. Much to his surprise, it turned out that the key to meeting people was his background in MATLAB (yes this is a love story born from coding). Soon Amber, among others, was more than happy to share a seat next to Luke in office hours or swing by his office to pick up a tip or two on how to get through dynamics homework with as little pain as possible, but as the semester progressed, what started out as professional partnerships soon turned into real friendships as homework sessions turned into pub-cycles and study groups started meeting at bars instead of libraries. Soon Amber and Luke found themselves two pieces of what had come to be quite a tight-knit friend group.

The semester rolled on, as did Amber and Luke’s friendship, and soon, Luke found Amber to be a dependable companion in many of his more trying times in Champaign. She drove him to clear out his car at the body shop after it was totaled. She helped him haul all the junk it had accumulated back to his tiny apartment in at the corner of Clark and Randolph. And she drove him to Chicago to catch his flight home for Thanksgiving so that he could purchase a new car and no longer rely on her as a personal chauffeur. When Luke got back from to Champaign Thanksgiving, he gifted Amber a print of a photo he had taken years before at one of his favorite spots near his home as a token of appreciation for helping him get back to that very place he called home.v

Then Christmas came and went and the New Year (and new semester) arrived, and Luke found a marked change in his day-to-day life in Champaign. As his doctoral research got more focused and his coursework more nuanced, he found himself spending more time in the statistics department on the main quad and less time in Newmark lab with the rest of his compatriots. And while he was still lucky enough to catch many of his newfound friends at sporting events or weekend outings, he very rarely anymore saw Amber (aside from 3 seconds every Tuesday/Thursday as they passed each other on the Engineering Quad). Truth is, he missed her quite a bit, but it was quite apparent that the days of naturally being around each other had come and gone. If he wanted to spend time with her he would have to make a concerted effort, so he did.