It’s nights like these that make you remember the time you watched High School Musical in a nail polish ingested room full of pigtailed girls and popcorn.
It was the night you texted that boy on your flip phone waiting for him to ask you to Terry Hall. It was the night you played Dance Dance Revolution with your best friends. It was the night you gathered in a circle after hours of dancing to talk about what you hope to be someday.
“I wonder what I’m going to look like in high school… I wonder if I’ll be popular… I hope I’ll have a boyfriend… I can’t wait to buy prom dresses… It’ll be so cool to drive… I want a blue jeep, like my Barbie’s.”
Now you’re driving away in a red Mazda (never got the jeep) in the December of your senior year and wondering where the time went.
The years of acne and disproportionate bodies have turned to a blur. The freshman flings and sophomore excitement of failing your first drivers test (ran a red light) have faded. The stress and worry of junior year has been pushed out of your mind,
and now you’re here.
It seems as though you’ve been preparing for this your entire life; leering across the staircase at the senior locker banks since the day you entered high school.
But now you watch across the same staircase, only you see the freshman, their short bodies and innocent faces, and can’t help but feel a twinge of sadness knowing they have a fun four years ahead, while yours are coming to a close.
6 months
Until you part your ways and enter the cliché “new chapter”
6 months
Until you leave the friendships, the losses, the relationships, and the heartache, in the walls of the building that you grew up in.
You were once them, until you blinked, and now you’re here,
waving out the window, yelling goodnight, to the people who were with you since the beginning. And it makes you forget about the next six months for a second. Forget about the future, forget about the worry, and forget about college.
It’s nights like these that remind you of the last 150 months. Nights like these; that you laugh, and dance, and eat, and skip, and cheer, and sing. That remind you of all the nights you’ve had just like this one.
The adventures that are long kept memories, the jokes that are forever funny, and the people that are lifelong friends.
The scholarly television series, One Tree Hill once quoted;
“You know it’s been said that we just don’t recognize the significant moments of our lives while they are happening,”
But tonight, I did.