During my freshman year in high school, I spent the afternoons with roughly 20 of my friends polishing the wooden floors of my living room and callousing our feet with the stone cement of my porch. We were children and we were alive. On Sundays, we'd gather at a usual time and put on some movie while we talked over every scene from intro to credits. We'd bake cakes, and cookies, and brownies using leftover McDonald's butter. They'd wear my pajamas, run around my front yard, and scream through their teeth. I watched them all and we reveled. Life as we knew it was easy and life as we knew it was my house with the dozens of us. My parents would spend my nonexistent college fund feeding all these mouths, as if they'd adopted an army of harmless free-spirits. At night we'd huddle together on my massive couches, sharing blankets and fighting over the golden-tasseled throw pillows that always found their way on the floor anyway, watching some scary movie that our bear of a friend would insist we see for the sole purpose of "SHITTING YOUR PANTS." Everyone was invited and you probably were too. We were young and drunk off ourselves. Nearly 6 years later, Life, without a fail, has found me. Some of us are off in the military, a four-year college, on that steady grind for minimum wage, at our nearest and most beloved community college, and even in cobble-stoned, starving Paris. This house will no longer be ours and the porch goes too. I am spending the last few days and nights on my porch, MY porch, remembering the life we once had here. Life has found them and now it's found me. In less than 30 days, I'll be off on my goddamned journey to being Nurse, Yours Truly and in less than 20 days, I will be on another porch, in another living room, paving a new life of adulthood, forever remembering the younger me. The younger us. I miss my friends. But like I said, Life has found us. I'm not sad, I'm just kind of sad. We couldn't stay here forever because if we did, we'd fill my house with bodies of heat which it always did back then, growing bodies of heat and we wouldn't have what we have now. I'm feeling reminiscent tonight and I'm feeling alright. I was ready for Life to find me, even if I was always such a late bloomer.
Never forgetting the most uncomfortable porch
