It’s funny, how much more friends can feel the way you’d imagine family should feel. Like closeness. Like comfort. There are bonds that can stretch across oceans, hearts that can communicate through forests, across nations and states, from city to city. There are loves that reverberate over mountain ranges. Those are the ones you’ll never forget. The ones you rarely make at this age. We’re too fast-paced, too focused on where were going to really hold onto each other. Sure, there’s love. But it’s not like the kind you can make when you’re a kid. There’s an innocence you need. An innocence that hasn’t necessarily abandoned us; indeed, we are still all too green sometimes. But it has morphed, changed into a new thing. Now, we’re cautious, and we think about our safety before we dive headlong into the traffic that comes with embracing someone.
One of the reasons I knew I had to come home was to see my sister, my across the street neighbor of twelve years, my best friend Bridget. But she’s got a new lover, and they’re young and overly intrigued by the feelings they have discovered how to elicit from one another. And because of this, she isn’t here for me. Though I don’t blame her – hell, I’ll admit I’m a drag – I wish she weren’t being quite so selfish. Maybe she just can’t right now.
In an hour, I get to wait on a few more tables. I’m not entirely unexcited. I just know I’m going to be distracted by the phantom smell of sunscreen that sticks under your nose after a day baking out in the sun with your best friends, especially if you haven’t seen them in a while. Aliya, she wants me to move out to California. Says she knows I could do it – well, I know that, too – she says I can do anything. It’s like that Bright Eyes song. “I’m leaving, but I don’t know where to.” Connor Oberst found solace in the cheery bright beauty of Los Angeles. He found sobriety in the saltless dinners they serve in the healthy west. But would that be right for me? Is LA what I really want? Maybe it ain’t even a question of what I want. In a way, I see the path. Or I’m beginning to. Step by step.
It’s just another part of being young and old I guess.
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