Kate and Sam’s big adventure

“Don’t bat your eyes at me, Brunn,” Kate said with disdain as Samantha tried to convince her to go to New York for spring break.

Turns out, it worked.

We’ve been planning our “big adventure” for awhile now. We bought tickets to see the band Caamp in Louisville, Ky. on what would be the first Saturday of break. From there, we would drive to Nashville, a city neither of us had ever visited. Then we were going to New York City so Samantha could tour law schools and Kate could tour 30 Rockefeller Center.

Kate threatened to sing every Broadway song she’d ever heard on the driving portion of the trip. Samantha threatened to drive the car over a ledge if she did.

But it turns out, we won’t be going on our spring break extravaganza.

Now, our big adventure involves a lot of social distancing and stocking up on baby wipes (Kroger was out of toilet paper when we went). We’ve assembled a rag-tag team of friends who are planning on riding this thing out in Oxford, and planning for what might happen if shit really hits the fan.

But, if we have to ride out a global pandemic, we wouldn’t want to do it any other way.

We both lived in McBride Hall our first year at Miami, and we were in the same Intro to Media and Culture class in the spring of 2017 (our professor only remembers one of us being in it (she remembers Samantha)).

We worked for the paper together our sophomore year. Samantha was a senior news staff writer and Kate was the assistant culture editor despite being wildly unqualified for the position. We shared yet another class together that fall 2018, and Samantha soon left for Washington, D.C. for that spring semester.

We decided to sign a lease together with our mutual friend Ceili. Ceili had to facilitate the entire thing because, despite that less-than-six-degrees of separation, we didn’t *actually* become friends until the fall of our junior year.

We had no idea we were that close our entire freshman year, and hardly spoke to each other sophomore year. Samantha had a tumultuous semester, making it difficult to do anything, let alone make new friends. Kate was just painfully shy. She hardly spoke in her classes freshman year, which is why some professors, and friends, don’t remember her being there.

It’s almost unimaginable to think there was a time in which we didn’t have one another to get through the days together. Samantha doesn’t know what she’d do without Kate’s ability to make everything sing-songy and fun, or her ability to make even the worst things better with her uncanny wisdom in tough situations. Kate has the most patience and the best dance moves of anyone Samantha has ever known.

Enjoy what you're reading?
Signup for our newsletter

Kate can’t remember how she got through life without Samantha’s big ole’ brain to guide her through the day. Whether it be a text to a boy, after school plans or problems with the TV, Samantha’s got it covered. She is a grounded voice of reason in any situation. She makes the best cocktails in Oxford. She is Kate’s favorite person to dance with Uptown.

We wrote those paragraphs separately! Aw!

The last night Kate was in Oxford before she went abroad during the spring of 2019, a group of our friends were celebrating in Top Deck.

“If this is how much fun we have in a semester,” Kate said to Samantha, “imagine how much fun we’ll have with a full year together.”

Kinda fucked up now, isn’t it?

Samantha started crying when Kate reminded her of that conversation.

Even though we won’t get a traditional, full-length senior year, we’ve had a pretty great time so far. We made a Senior Spring bucket list at the beginning of the semester, and we’ve already finished over half of the things on it. The ones that are left weren’t that important, anyway.

We still get to wake up every morning in our little yellow house on West Church Street and make pancakes and crepes and feed our pet fish. We still have the friends we met along the way to make us laugh and hug us tight when we get sad over how crappy things feel right now. We have roughly a year and a half worth of late nights, long talks and an amazing Lumineers concert under our belt.

Kate watched Samantha get into law school. Samantha taught Kate the difference between it’s and its (at least she tried to).

It turns out, we’ve been on our big adventure this whole time, and it’s not ending anytime soon.

Whatever the next few months and years looks like, we know we’ll be able to count on the other to see us through it — regardless of whether it's across a living room, newsroom or country.

So bring it on, dinks.

@samantha_brunn

brunnsj@miamioh.edu

rigazikm@miamioh.edu