One time my friend — she’s Pakistani — took me to her sorority formal. I wasn’t very surprised that she was the only brown girl at the dance, I was less surprised that I was the only brown guy there, and I was even less surprised that we were together.
She went around introducing me to all her friends in the sorority and their dates, and though I forgot everyone’s name as soon as I moved on to the next person I remember very clearly how conveniently paired up everyone was. Black and black, Asian and Asian, white and white, and for us, brown and brown. It’s like a game of Memory: find the two things that match, pair them together, and you win.
I got separated from her once but she was pretty easy to pick out from the crowd. As I weaved through the crowd to find her I wondered if everyone I was bumping into could automatically tell that we were together or if she’d felt compelled to make sure that her guy matched not only her dress but also her skin tone.
Whenever I showed my friends the photos from the formal, they gushed that the photos were so cute and we fit so well together that I should have made one of them my profile picture. Of course we fit well together. We were a Memory pair.