The intricacies of humanity never fail to leave me in awe.

“If you were anything, you’d be poetry, and your cursive looks like you’ve been writing since, like, Emily Dickinson was alive.”

I didn’t know I knew her that well, but the girl in my physics class said these words on a random Thursday during a fire drill.

I laugh and say something about how if I were anything I would hope I was poetry, and that I wish I was alive at the same time as Emily Dickinson.

This girl is one of those people who I know I won’t know forever, but I know her now and that’s enough.

We’re acquaintances, I guess, but it feels like more than that when I say something and she laughs and we walk through the door to sixth hour together.

It’s 12:36 am and I text my best friend, “I think I’ve been half in love with everyone I’ve ever met.” All she says in her reply is “Alright Ev, time to go to bed.”

And she’s right, of course, and we both know it. It’s late and my emotions rise with the moon and I probably would never have sent that text during the day, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

I love humanity, I love people, it’s impossible to witness the glory of life in any human form and not be in awe of my witnessing it.

Maybe it’s just when I’m lonely, but sometimes all I can think about is the way people kick their feet through the air when sitting high above the ground, and I miss everyone I’ve ever spoken to.

There are people I know this year that I will never speak to again, but I’ll never forget them either.

The girl who sits next to me laughs whenever something absurd happens in the class; we play hangman and tic-tac-toe when we’re bored.

The boy across from me in Spanish; he’s smarter than me and knows I’m going to ask him how to conjugate “dar.” I sit across from him every day but I know nothing more about him than what he got on the last quiz and what his accent sounds like when he switches languages.

The person across the room from me in math. We joked one day about how completely incomprehensible the lesson was, and now, every time we don’t understand something, we make eye contact, sigh at each other, shaking our heads.

The people from this year will join the ones from the past.

Acquaintances, interactions, memories that I pass in the hallway who I smile at sometimes and pray they smile back.

A fourth-grade group of us going to the kindergarten wing every Friday. Four people on a bus ride whining about the heat and the stuffiness, and the ongoing school year. They are flashes of humanity that I’ll run into on the street one day in May, years in the future.

If they remember me the same way I remember them, we’ll exchange nothing more than a smile or an inside joke about our seventh-grade band teacher. We’ll wave goodbye, and for a second, I’ll be back in my high school hallway, my middle school classroom, my elementary school playground, falling in love with every person I meet.

An Uber driver in NYC, two women walking every day through our neighborhood, and a man picking up my lunchbox when it fell forgotten to the floor in the museum.

A girl running into me, spilling her coffee on me in a rush, looking at me and seeing me, complimenting my dress, and apologizing profusely.

“You look lovely, and I love you, and I’ll never apologize enough.”

All of those people, all of their words and thoughts, interactions and love, fill in the gaps between my crooked teeth and the cracks in my fingernails.

I’ll love them all forever.