#i have a very normal amount of feelings about winteam’s ldr

[thebroccolination]

So, I love WinTeam’s LDR. Win goes abroad to London for two years to get his masters degree while Team is still in undergrad. And like, it’s excruciating for them I’m sure, but imagine this with me, right:

It’s the dead of winter. Snow fell in London for most of the day, and while some of it has been crushed into slush by millions of boots and shoes and doggy galoshes, a good deal of it is still left by nightfall. The park you like to go to when you’re homesick is like a world entirely apart from ours, and there are some quiet pockets that must be breathtaking when they’re covered in snow. The street lamps are more orange than white, and it must just be so peaceful and soft.

And now imagine you’re a grad student from Thailand, wrapped up in a thick duvet on your sofa, waiting for your jet-lagged boyfriend asleep with his head on your chest to wake up and see snow for the first time in his life. Imagine you haven’t seen him in months and you’ve spent the whole day half-convinced that he’s something you’re imagining because how can you feel this happy again so quickly and so easily after you’ve been so lonely and miserable without him all this time?

Now imagine Team waking up in Win’s dark, quiet living room in London, his face bright and then shaded in turn by the changing lights of the TV screen on the wall. Think of Win watching him. Team will ask what time it is, and Win will lie just to make Team think he slept through dinner. (Not that it matters, since Win would delight in giving Team whatever he wants at any hour of the day.) When they’ve squabbled for a bit, comfortable and giddy and a little electric from the excitement of being together again, Win will say, “Hey, get up. I want you to see something.”

He’ll lead Team—snuggled in the duvet like a caterpillar in a halfhearted cocoon—across the room and to the window. It won’t occur to Win until later that he’s the only one in the world who got to see Team’s adorably young and enchanted smile when he realized what he was looking at on the streets outside the building.

“Hia,” he’ll say in an awed breath, and by now that word has a full dialect within it.

And they’ll get dressed and walk to the park hand-in-hand, and Team will make a tiny snowman from the snow piled on the slats of a bench. While Team works, Win will record and post a video to his IG story of Team meticulously fitting twigs into the little snowman’s middle blob. Win will jealously cover the original sound with a Christmas song because no one gets to hear Team’s sweet, cheerful humming except for him.

Later, under a street lamp, when there’s been a long enough gap between passersby and no one’s in sight, Team will kiss Win with his hands buried deep and warm in the pockets of Win’s black wool coat, and Win will smile and hold him with confident familiarity.

It’ll be one of their favorite memories together.