This weekend, I watched Off Campus on Prime and fell completely in love with it.
Two things have always been true about me at once: I love the slow, subtitled, visually exquisite films critics call important, and I love deeply emotional young adult stories with the same sincerity. Give me the Oscar-winning international film about grief and identity. Give me the college romance, too — the bad decisions, the longing looks, the friendships that feel world-altering at nineteen.
I need both.
Lately, I’ve been leaning toward the second. I think it’s because my teenage and college years remain some of the most defining of my life.
The angst. The experimentation. The heartbreak. The becoming.
At the time, every feeling felt permanent. Every decision carried the weight of a future I couldn’t yet see. I remember dating different kinds of boys, trying to understand not just what kind of partner I liked, but what version of myself appeared beside them. I remember friendships that pushed me past the edges of who I thought I was — the ones that convinced me to stay out too late, book the trip, dance anyway, speak to the stranger, say yes.
I think about Jessica’s red couch. That couch held so many of our stories — the post-party debriefs at three in the morning, the bodega snacks we swore we wouldn’t finish and always did, the conversations that started as gossip and ended somewhere closer to philosophy. I remember walking back to her place at two in the morning, both of us in last night’s eyeliner, splitting whatever we’d grabbed from the corner diner because neither of us wanted the night to end. The streetlights. The particular pitch of her laugh. The certainty that we would be exactly this close forever. One morning we woke up on that couch still half-drunk from the night before and somehow decided the right move was to go see Step Upat the theater down the street. We came out genuinely convinced it was the best film ever made. I still don’t know whether that was the alcohol or Channing Tatum. Probably both. What I remember most is laughing the entire walk home, certain in the way you can only be certain at that age that this was the life, that this was how it would always be.
I didn’t understand then that those years were quietly building the architecture of my adulthood.
Watching these stories now, I get to revisit those years with tenderness instead of fear. I can laugh at the drama of it — the overthinking, the emotional spirals, the certainty that one unanswered text could end your life. But I feel protective of that younger version of myself, too. She was trying so hard. She was learning how to love other people while slowly learning how to love herself.
Maybe that is why these stories still move me. Not because I wish to go backward, but because they remind me of what it felt like to believe life was still unfolding in infinite directions.
There is something beautiful about that age before cynicism fully settles in. Before people begin speaking about life primarily through limitation and practicality. At nineteen, the world is overwhelmingly alive. Every city could change you. Every conversation could become a story you carry for years.
What makes these series even more meaningful now is sharing them with my niece, who is in the middle of her own college years. Watching her navigate friendships, independence, attraction, identity — all of it — is stranger and more emotional than I expected. Sometimes we watch the same scenes and laugh at entirely different things. Sometimes we relate to the exact same moments despite the decades between us.
And in those conversations, I realize something quietly comforting:
In my heart, I will probably always be a teenage girl.
Not in immaturity. Not in naïveté. In openness.
I still believe certain cities can permanently alter you. I still believe in chance encounters. I still move through the world believing something beautiful could happen at any moment.
I hope I never lose that. Because the day you stop believing in possibility is the day life starts to shrink.
Maybe growing older is not about becoming less hopeful or less romantic. Maybe it is about learning to carry that younger version of yourself forward with more wisdom, more grace, and far less fear.
To let her survive inside you.
Still curious. Still emotional. Still ready for the next adventure.
Isabelle Alerte is the writer behind In Written Word, an editorial site on place, taste, and lived experience. She lives in Miami.
If this stayed with you.
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