I met strangers whose names and faces I forgot by the day’s end, but whose stories loitered and lingered in my memory. “Is proof a prerequisite for existence?”

I hope not.

I asked so many questions that Sunday, questions whose answers I learned were placeholders at best. Questions that couldn’t be answered, or didn’t need to be answered, because what mattered most was that they were being answered at all.

I met so many strangers and heard so many stories, and I suppose I should have expected this. I was, after all, working a journalism internship.

But I certainly didn’t expect how willing these strangers would be to let me become privy into what I can only assume were otherwise undisclosed admissions of vulnerability.

I didn’t expect, either, how hard it would be. To not include these stories into the story that appeared in print. The one with the tight nutgraf. And interspersed quotes. And an overarching theme.

I didn’t expect to want to read and write these stories more. The ones on the periphery. The ones that loiter and linger. The ones that overlap and interact and sustain the plot of another story.

The one about the investment banker who, feeling unfulfilled, opened up a strange place filled with strange cats and even stranger news.

Aisha Y. Bhoori, ’18, lives in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.