You Tryna Say You Love Me?

After losing his mother and suffering a shoulder injury that takes him out of competitive diving, a freshman athlete finds himself emotionally unmoored at an elite university. But when a classmate from his philosophy seminar gives voice to a feeling he’s unable to define, he invites her out on a late-night study break, hoping that connection might offer him a way back to himself. What follows is a charged, chicken-or-the-egg debate about the origins of language and feeling: Do we inherently know what we feel, and seek language to articulate it? Or can the addition, or absence, of vocabulary shape feelings we’ve lost, forgotten, or have yet to discover?