Remember that warm night we sat in the wildflowers on the hill and messed with time? The moon was waning, and we mused over a busy skyline from the middle of nowhere.
Remember that summer when all we did was swim and eat soggy pizza? At the same time? We fell off your longboard on the hill, and I had blisters all over my feet from running on harsh pavement.
Or that time we made burnt flan for a Spanish project, and it oozed all over your jeans on the way to school? We dried them off in the locker room and served the weary flan anyway.
Do you remember when we swam after our beach trail 5k?
We took off towards the sea, dropping our bags, fumbling over our shirts, and inhaling with the freeze.
The breeze was soft and cool, the sky was soft and pink, the sea was soft and sensual.
Joy swelled our hearts, and we knew what it meant to be present, to be free- the distance runners in all of their breathless glory. These are the times we learned what it means to feel alive.
And remember that time I was weighed down by so many skies that you pulled out your 12 string to remind me that All I Need is Love?
Because what else did we learn from high school except that Love is the most important thing. This is who we are.
And somewhere in all of the journeying, our wild, laughing spirits accidentally planned for the future.
My hope for the future is that you never lose the passion and conviction of that detailed letter you wrote your mom about why the ants should be allowed to live in the kitchen.
I hope that you hold close the bliss of when it rained so hard we couldn’t see each other from opposite sides of the street, rained so hard we could barely hear our own laughter, rained so hard that rolling in the puddle over the storm drain was drier than standing still.
I hope that the way we waltzed when our numbers were dwindling on the junior prom dance floor convinces you over and over to refuse monotony. May you embrace the day of curves and arches and hatters when the rabbit scurries past you at an odd hour.
My hope for the future is that you do not lose touch with the eye for beauty of the part of you that tried planting a sunflower garden in the sandbox with bird seed, the boldness of that essay you turned in with the funky conclusion, the compassion of you-the-designated-late-night-listener, the resilience of all the times you kept walking through those high school doors when waking up was hard enough.
This nostalgia is not uncalled for. There is something to be said for being seen in unusual ways, the way high school taught us that aloneness does not turn a person into a community. This Joy is not lost on us.
We are the urgency of linking our tamagotchis on Bus 6, camp songs on the route to Stoneham when the Batch was being rebuilt, the Green Day track at the end of every dance. We are a people who decorate insistently bare, white walls with colorful sticky notes. We are the redundancy of joining clubs among our own interconnectivity. We are shaky hands back when everything was new, our shifting allies, our Messy Musings. All at once, in unity.
We were sitting in the wildflowers on the hill when we shook hands, swore against falling for “normal.”
We were just joking around, but we knew we meant it.
PLUTO BLOOMING 