I met these girls I knew from middle and high school today.
I won’t name names. Theirs, the names they named, the ones I named, the stories we shared, the rationale for our laughter.
But I came away, realizing why I left.
There’s that thing about how people never really leave high school, never really grow up. But it’s not just high school. The same drama, the same gossip, I heard it in undergrad, I hear it in grad school, I hear it from my friends who are already in the working world, minting money and breaking their bones for broke.
Friends tell me about vacations gone awry, about parents who are too strict, friends who’ve become frenemies, boyfriends who neglect them, girl friends who wish to become girlfriends, and friends with benefits gone awry. I, myself, spent the last who-knows-how-many days annoyed by a friend calling me a “churail” and a prospective boyfriend disappearing on me for the millionth time. These are the stories we share, so we can laugh and whine, with people from another world, another time.
She’s still so much the same. But aren’t I?
“You need a break from guys.” That’s what she told me, advice that I never managed to listen to. And years later, every time I sit at the table, it’s the same drama, the same gossip, the same people, the same problems, sometimes different people, just in a different time and place.
But there’s the truths we don’t talk about, always lurking.
I left my friends behind on that sidewalk, getting into my van, turning on my own music, and driving away from a place I knew I never belonged so I could go to another place I only now feel like I do belong, long after everyone else is gone.
When I drive these streets, I’m not accompanied by the same girls that I walked home from school with, that I went to movies with, that I gossiped about boys with, that I complained about homework with. I don’t get chai with them at Soni Plaza. I don’t drive with them to Old Bridge Waterfront Park. And I definitely didn’t take any of them with me all the way to Abington, or Behrend, or Durham.
And it feels like home.
Home is not where the heart is. It’s where your heart wants to be even when you’re not there.
Don’t get me wrong — I love them.
I love the girls I met tonight just as much as the ones I talk to on the daily.
But I’m exhausted. And I didn’t realize how exhausted until I drove away, thinking not of all the laughs we shared, the stories, the secrets, the gossip, the drama, and the walk down memory lane, but of my friend who needs to go into the army.
Nanna likes to say often, as a way of combating his own frustrations with the way life can be sometimes, that there are wars out there and people here are complaining about their coffee being too bitter and the waitstaff taking too long. (I’m paraphrasing.)
Never once when he said this did I ever think someone I love would be going off onto a battlefield.
But he’s not wrong.
We love living in our little bubbles but no amount of laughter and whining over trivial nuisances will diminish the emptiness growing in my heart.
But the tears won’t come.
It won’t hit now. It won’t hit when I see him next. When he leaves.
Maybe some weeks from now, or months, or even years, in the middle of the night, as soon as I turn off my music, I’ll remember us driving down a highway with Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” playing on the Spotify, his laughter following my quip that all her songs are about me, and I’ll have to cry myself to sleep.
Wherever you go, my friend, come back home safe to me.
– Samhi C.
