Away from her boyfriend for grad school, Meisa Salaita starts to fall for a chemistry classmate who's her complete opposite.

Meisa Salaita is enamored with the beauty of science. Through her work founding and directing the Atlanta Science Festival and as a producer for the Story Collider, she spends her days trying to convince everyone else to fall in love with science as well. To that end, Meisa also writes, has produced radio stories, and hosted tv shows - all in the name of science. Meisa has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has birthed two humans, and has a bizarre level of enthusiasm for shoehorns. If she had the stamina and talent, she’d be dancing hip-hop 24/7.

This story originally aired on November 1, 2019 in an episode titled “Crushes.”

Story Transcript

I’m in my first quarter of grad school and every Monday, Wednesday, Friday starts off the exact same way: 8:00 a.m. Structural Inorganic Chemistry. Now, this is supposed to be my favorite class, because I love this shit, but it ends up being my professor just droning monotonously for an hour with 20-year-old slides that he puts up on this ancient overhead projector. It's not fun and it's not fun to have it at 8:00 a.m. But I am a rule follower and if I am taking a class, I show up every day.

It's maybe a couple of weeks in that one of my classmates, his name is Khalid, he strolls up to me and he's like, “Hey, can I borrow your notes?” And I am a very nice person and I was an exceptionally good note-taker and I was eager to show this off.

So I'm like, “Yes,” and I whip open my three-ring binder and I find the right divider tab and find these perfectly colored-coded notes and I hand them over to him. I guess he really likes them because, a couple of days later, he asked to borrow them again.

I'm still nice and so I hand them over again, maybe a little bit less eagerly. But this time, when I look at him, I notice that he looks remarkably well slept. It's very clear to me that he is not waking up for this 8:00 a.m. class.

A couple more days pass and he asks again. This time I just looked at him and I was like, “Dude, why don't you just try waking up?” And Khalid laughs like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard.

But, me, I don't think it's funny at all. I mean, this whole grad school thing is not going how I imagined it. I thought I'd fit in better. I thought I'd make friends faster. I just really miss my college life. I really miss my boyfriend Mac.

Mac and I have been together since freshman year and Mac's not at all like Khalid. He's like nothing I've met. No one I've met at Northwestern, really. Mac is… well, he's exactly how you'd imagine a Mac to be. If everyone could close their eyes for a second and picture a Mac, I feel pretty sure that about 75% of us in this room are imagining the same person.

He's big, 6’2”, 6’4” maybe, but not tall in like he's got heft. And he drives a big, red pickup truck. He likes to fish and he listens to country music.

Now, I never thought of myself as somebody who would date a Mac. I like to spend my weekends in museums, not watching NASCAR. That's for sure. You can't trace my American lineage back to the Civil War and beyond. I am first-generation American and I speak Persian at home with my family. And I most definitely do not listen to country music.

But somehow, we work. And when we graduated and we decided to go to separate schools for graduate school, him to West Virginia for law school and me to Chicago for chemistry graduate school, it felt heartbreaking. It still feels heartbreaking, but it's okay. There's some things about my new life that I really do love.

I've really fallen in love with Chicago. It feels like there is always something to do here and that anything is possible in this city. As for Mac, he ends up in about as opposite a place as you can imagine. When I go visit him and we walk around, there is no hustle and bustle. Strike that. We never walk. We drive, and often for miles and miles without seeing much of anything. It's about as opposite as you could get from the life that I'm living and it's hard to understand how we've drifted physically into such different spaces.

But it's okay. We're going strong. We talk every night. We have visits planned every couple of months and it's all right. We're going strong. It's great.

As time passes, it feels a little bit better. We get adjusted to our new lives and the distance starts to feel a little bit less hard. I start to make friends and, weirdly, I've even become friends with Khalid. I mean, he's still an annoying moocher and he's maybe the most disorganized person I've ever met in my life.

You know Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comic strip and that cloud of dust that follows him, it's like Khalid except a cloud of chaos instead of dust.

Now, I'm calling him Khalid but really his name is Khaalid. He's Jordanian. He's not at all tall. He doesn't fish and he'd have no clue where to find his local honky-tonk, if he even knew what that was. And I have to admit that despite my distaste in his disorganization, I do think he's quite cute. But that does not matter. I am meant to marry Mac and Khalid is meant to take his tornado of chaos somewhere far away from me.

But we do this thing in our second year of grad school called a qualifying exam and, as we're preparing for it, we start spending a lot of time together. And I find myself getting completely sucked up by his tornado instead of in the storm shelter where I'm supposed to be hiding and pining for Mac.

I don't know how this happens to me because I am not a big drinker, but the night we pass our qualifying exam, I find myself at a bar, drunk and snuggled up in his lap. From what my friends say the next morning, he didn't seem to mind it at all.

But I am horrified. I mean, I have a boyfriend. He has a girlfriend. I was drinking. Who am I? Not this person, I know.

Then it happens again. And then I find myself looking for any and every reason to go to shitty bars with my friends just so I can get chummy with this guy who, oh, my God, is so cute but really, entirely wrong for me. But is he… I mean, just because he's a ball of chaos and I'm scheduled to a tee, I mean he makes me laugh all the time and that's great.

We found a million commonalities between our Arab and Persian cultures. We both like science and we can actually talk to each other about what we're doing. In fact, it kind of feels like we can talk to each other about anything.

My 24th birthday rolls around and I decide the best way to celebrate is at a downtown Chicago dueling piano bar. I told you anything was possible in this city. And in the midst of the many margaritas I had in me or, let's be real, it’s probably two. I'm a lightweight. I decide that I'm not just going to snuggle with this guy. I am going to kiss him.

But despite being drunk, I'm still smart. And I recognize that the optics of this are not good. I mean, I still have a boyfriend, he maybe has a girlfriend, and I need to come up with a plan. So I hatched one. I decide that I'm going to kiss as many people as possible so that when I kiss him he's just one of many and no one will know.

So I get myself fired up. I dance my ass off to one of the piano duelers playing Madonna's Like a Prayer and then I enact the plan. First, I kiss my roommate Andrea, then I kiss some random old dude named Tony, and then I laser in on my target and I am just about to do the deed when Andrea Yanks me out of the bar. You see, I had a good plan. Some of you might say brilliant. But I neglected to remember that Andrea is very smart. She has an extremely strong moral compass and she was going to see right through me.

So she yanks me out of the bar and she says, “Meisa, what are you doing? I can't stand by and watch you do this to Mac. It's not fair.”

And she was right. Flirtation, friendship, all of it, it had to stop. I was not being fair to this man that I loved.

So the next morning when I wake up and Andrea's words are echoing in my brain, I resolve no more Khalid. And I have the perfect opportunity to make things right again because a week after plan Kiss-Everyone-At-The-Bar falls apart, I am set to go to my alma mater and meet Mac for a weekend birthday celebration.

So I go and I feel determined that I am going to make things right again and it feels super weird and very, very hard but I'm trying. I'm pushing those feelings down. And we're walking around campus and it's lovely. And then I realized that he is leading me to the bridge.

See, there's this really picturesque bridge on campus and, legend has it, if you walk over it with somebody, you're going to marry them. And I freak. And I beg, “Please, let's not go there. Oh, look. What's over there? Let's walk that way,” and I pull on his arm and he insists and, before I know it, he is down on one knee.

I immediately start bawling and Mac takes my tears as ones of joy and a positive answer to his request and I let him think that.

So I fly back to Chicago with a ring on my finger. And when Khalid sees me, it's like all the air has gotten sucked out of him. See, by this point he's fallen pretty hard for me as well and he's just kind of waiting for me to get to the same place, but I'm not there. I mean, I've been with Mac for five years. We are supposed to be together.

And even if we're not, I mean, how can I break his heart? I can't do that. Taking that ring meant I made my choice and I was sticking to it.

So the next few months pass and Khalid and I kind of dance around each other. I try, I really try but it feels like we can't find a way to stay apart. He's become my best friend at school, the one I always want to be around, and I feel stuck in this place where every choice I make is the wrong one and is unfair to somebody. I spend a lot of time crying. I suppose I should thank Mac for introducing me to country music. It makes the perfect soundtrack to my life.

After a while, it gets to be too much. I realize that I don't want to be in West Virginia. I don't want to spend my weekends tailgating at football games I care nothing about. I don't want to think about why the fish aren't biting that day. But what I really don't want is Mac.

And coming to grips with the realization of this is simultaneously the most horrifying and freeing feeling. And I know what I have to do. I fly home. My dad drives me to West Virginia in a snowstorm and he drops me at Mac's apartment. It's horribly sad but also weirdly transactional. I give him the ring. He gives me a Tupperware my mom sent food in, and I go home.

When I get back to Chicago, Khalid is not there. He's back in Jordan visiting his family and so I get a couple days to be alone with my thoughts. I'm heartbroken but also I feel so free and just so excited that I get the chance to be with somebody who makes me laugh all the time, who understands me, who likes the same things I like and still pushes me beyond the world that I know. And maybe it won't last but maybe it will.

A couple of days later, Khalid flies back from Jordan and I go pick him up from O'Hare and he sees my ring-less finger. He runs to give me a kiss. It's one we've waited a long time to have and it feels so right, not just because I wasn't drunk. I made my choice and this time it was the right one. Thank you.