theartofgrowingblog

[theartofgrowingblog]

to those i used to know

I had a best friend all throughout high school. I won’t say her real name, so we will call her Holly. Holly and I were joined at the hip. At school events, we would huddle together on the bleachers, making fun of whatever happened or laughing at videos on our phones. We played the Sims and pretended like we knew how to do makeup. Lana Del Rey’s “Born To Die” album was the soundtrack of our teen years.

We met for ice cream last month. I wore an outfit I never would have dared to in high school. I drove my own car there and listened to Lana Del Rey for nostalgia. I hadn’t seen her in three years, not since our high school graduation. 

I remembered it. I had been an online student for my entire senior year because my mom is immunocompromised and I am an introvert. I also had no friends to spend the senior year with. So why would I bother? Everyone thought I had just homeschooled instead and was surprised to see me at graduation. I got a picture with a few of the people I remained acquaintances with and we talked about Dungeons & Dragons. 

I saw Holly there. I wasn’t quite myself yet, so I didn’t talk to her. I was scared that we had ended on bad terms I was not aware of, so I went to see my family instead.

She reached out to me early this year. We had brief exchanges of ‘you look great’s or ‘I love that game’s, but hadn’t had a real conversation in four years.

So we met for ice cream. It was awkward at first. We didn’t know how to talk to each other anymore. I am not 16 years old. I am nearly 21. 

I’m proud of her still. She has grown, just like I have. She is not 16 years old. She is 21. She is doing good things with her life. She has a good support system. She has fun. She has grown without me. And I am proud of it rather than sad.

We are planning on hanging out again soon. I had to re-give her my phone number. Maybe we can get to know each other as adults.

My childhood best friend was a girl named Taylor (not really, but you get the gist). We met when I was the new kid in third grade. I’d just transferred from a tiny public school to a sizable county school. I didn’t know anyone. I sat at lunch with a girl I didn’t know that well and moved seats when she puked on my sneakers.

I don’t remember how me and Taylor started hanging out, but we were fast friends. We basically lived at each other’s houses. Her grandmother was like my own. I tried Starbucks for the first time with her. That’s a big deal for a basic white girl like myself.

We went through a lot together, but we remained the strongest of friends. Most pictures of me between age 9 and age 13 have her in them in some way. We always made sure we were in the same class (her grandmother worked at the school, so we did utilize a bit of nepotism). 

We talked about boys and tried to learn to do makeup and painted each others’ nails. We played stupid long games of truth or dare. We were basically sisters. We couldn’t wait to get older and be able to go out by ourselves. We were girls together.

She has a baby now. I sent her a gift when he was born, but had to text her grandmother to ask for her address. We haven’t seen each other since 8th grade.

I decided it wasn’t cool to hang out with her anymore, since a more popular girl wanted to be my friend. She ate lunch with a mutual friend for about a month before transferring schools.

I didn’t feel guilty about what I did until a similar thing happened to me. It wasn’t a good thing to do. I know that. I was thirteen, but I knew better.

She seems like a wonderful mother. I’ve never met her son, but he is adorable and has the cutest chubby cheeks. I hope he liked the toy I sent him.

I have another friend, let’s call her Melanie. Melanie was my soul sister in ninth grade. We just clicked. We spent the night together and watched Riverdale and went to the mall together (unattended!). We took selfies in school bathrooms and she would help me fix my hair in seventh period. 

Being 14-years-old is hard enough as is, but having Melanie helped me more than she knows. She moved to Indiana the next year. I missed her so much, and we messaged and kept up with each other through Facebook and Snapchat. 

She still texts me “happy birthday” and sends me the Snapchat memories she gets of us. 

“Omg, we were babies!” was my most recent response to a picture of us with a very dated dog filter on. 

My saving grace in 11th grade was a boy I’ll call Devin. Devin was my best friend when I needed it most. I was the most alone I’d ever been. Holly and I weren’t talking anymore and I would either skip lunch in the bathroom or eat with my favorite teacher. We had mutual friends, but he noticed when I disappeared from the lunchroom. He started eating in the classroom with me. He would bring his Nintendo Switch and he would always beat me in Smash Bros. He tried to teach me how to play Yu-Gi-Oh! and I never caught on. We came up with a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Devin helped me beat the permeating loneliness of being friendless in high school.

Devin and I don’t talk anymore. I ran into him in the university union the other day and it was distant.

I still carry pieces of every person I have ever known. I still play the Sims because Holly showed it to me. I eat Tostino’s Pizza Rolls because I tried them for the first time with Taylor and we loved them. I still have the perfume I bought while at the mall with Melanie. I play as the character that I made for Devin’s D&D campaign.

I crack jokes that old friends made first. I massage a popcorn bag before putting it in because a girl I went to elementary school with said that it gets butterier that way. I keep Marco’s ranch in my refrigerator just in case my best friend Brooke comes by and wants some. I hate ranch. I read text out loud in movies and TV shows because my mom can’t see it well from the couch. I didn’t even notice I did it until my boyfriend told me it’s cute when I do. 

I am more than myself. I am a mosaic of all that have loved me and all that will love me. When I hate myself, I hate the combination of thousands of years of love. When I get aggravated at something I do, it’s probably something I gained from an old friend or a distant relative. 

I am me because someone loved me.

[theartofgrowingblog]

Adult loneliness and my new life

As a person, fundamentally, all I have ever wanted were friends. It sounds vain to say now, wanting people to thanklessly admire me and wish to spend their time around me. But I would love to be in someone’s orbit, and to maybe have an orbit of my own. 

Nowadays, I find myself feeling more and more like a distant dwarf planet in others’ solar system. Days without a text from my college friends are reaching triple digits. I enviously look at what other people my age are doing with their groups. They have a year or two left in college and their smiles show it. I’m moving houses.

I think moving contributes to this creeping feeling of loneliness I have hanging over me. I find myself lingering on every corner of my childhood home, scared that I may forget something in the 70 miles between myself and my family. My family expects me to say some grand things about how much I will miss them, I think. I’m not good with spoken word. I clam up any time the attention shifts to me and why I don’t express my sorrow at going at the ripe age of 21. It isn’t that I won’t miss them. I know I will. I know the tightness that pulls at my chest as I drive further away, like a tether that is pulled to its absolute limit. The boxes in my car feel like little fragments of myself that I am slowly, one-by-one breaking away from my old life. I know that I cried to a sappy country song my baby sister sent me because it made her think of me. An hour and a half later, my eyes still weren’t dry. I know that I cried while my mom dried my hair yesterday, because I was scared it would be the last time. We sang the same songs we did when I was a child and for a brief, fleeting moment, I was her five-year-old, doe-eyed baby girl again. 

I cannot put it into words when they’re supposed to come out of my mouth. My neverending internal monologue ceases and all I can manage is a lousy “Of course I’ll miss you.” I see the disappointment on their faces when that’s all I say.

What I want to say is this: I am sorry I can be so mean. I’m sorry that the teenage angst that I buried for 10 years bubbled over and finally came to the surface in my twenties, during my last few months at home. I’m sorry I took you all for granted when you were just 10 feet away from my closed bedroom door. I wish I didn’t wear earbuds on long family trips and I wish that I didn’t waste my teenage years on academics. I should have had more movie nights and less cram nights. 

The first night I spent in my house, I turned to my boyfriend and said, “It’s too quiet.” He thought it was funny, since I had always complained so much about how loud my sister and her friends could be. While it’s something I’ve wanted for years, I don’t think I like the quiet that much. 

I wasted years of my life wishing for an orbit of friends. I already have one in my family, and now that I realize it, I’m leaving it all behind.

I hate the terms “new life” and “old life”. I’m not a new person because I happened to graduate and find employment in a new city. I’m still me. I still love my family. They’re still the only people I can stand to see every day.

I think my first few months in my new city will be spent crying. Doesn’t mean I didn’t want to move. I think I’m just mourning the life I took for granted.

[theartofgrowingblog]

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