After Jenny Han released her final installment of the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy, I read Always and Forever, Lara Jean and fell in love with UVA the same way Lara Jean fell in love with Peter Kavinsky: a little bit naively, but wholeheartedly.
After packing up from Texas and arriving at UVA, I dragged my first friend to the famous McGregor Room to see if it truly was the magic library that Han’s novel had sold me on. We tip-toed down the staircase, our footfalls seeming to echo endlessly. Too scared by the silence to venture any further, we stood in the doorway of the famous Harry Potter room as two first-years. Turning around, we giggled and ran.
“It feels like it’ll give me sneezes,” my friend said.
Since then, I’ve never stepped foot in the McGregor Room. Instead of searching for the threads of another person’s story at UVA, I’ve learned to start writing my own. In the words of Lara Jean, “It’s not like in the movies. It’s better, because it’s real.” The Netflix adaptation’s change in setting (switching the college acceptances of the main protagonists) means we’ll never get the scene where Lara Jean watches Peter run up the steps of the Rotunda Rocky-style and follows after him. My friend and I however, ran up those stairs and sat down side-by-side, sharing headphones. Perhaps we were five second background characters in someone else’s movie, but that memory will forever be eternal even when the melody stops. My first of many future Rotunda scenes was better than any movie script because I got to write my own narrative. From morning sunrises to witnessing the glowing moon over the Lawn on sleepless nights, these moments are no longer someone else’s dreams—they’re my reality.