When we say goodbye, It’s amazing to me how quickly your brain starts to process information and there’s a million and one things you should have said but you couldn’t. All the countless times that you spent just talking and getting to know someone its nonexistent but as soon as your forced to say a goodbye the dam breaks and the thoughts flood. I always wondered why that was. I honestly think it’s because as much as people say goodbye to things or each other every day it never gets easier because each of these goodbyes Carry different weight. It isn’t so much in the goodbye or even the person it’s in the aftermath. If I believe that I’m not seeing you again or I wont for a very long time the goodbye carries the weight of the world all the things you never said instead of being on the tip of your tongue they’re spewed out all over but no one is there to witness the mess. When someone leaves you they take a piece of you with them, well it’s not so much that they take it but it’s the place in your heart that they have. Its the blood sweat and tears that engulfs the walls people have built up that you have scaled and conquered to see their core. You never realize the significant moments in your life when they’re happening always as they are taken away from us because the moment is all that is left. The goodbye is what brings the significance because you never thought it would be so hard. The world keeps moving and life goes on and I think that some people will hide behind that. Using it as a reason to not let the full wave emotion overtake them because they don’t believe it will matter in the greater scheme, but these relationships and connections we make are the bigger picture and hopefully we learn from each piece of us that someone takes and we will say the words we want to say before it becomes our last words because despite the supposed closure of a clean farewell the power of realizing you’re in those significant moments will forever be one of the best parts of life.

It’s always been crazy to me how friends could grow apart, like at one moment you couldn’t imagine ever having a life without them.  They’re the people you laughed the hardest with and cried the most too it’s the purest form of love because it’s built from shared innocence and its so rare to find that these days.  It fizzles away with heartaches and heartbreaks and just the on goings of a mundane 9-5 or even the occasional bar romp where the actual indever never lives up to the hype.  You can’t ever match a fantasy because, it’s just that it’s the only place in our minds where wanting more, hoping for more isn’t scary.  

I made a friend when I was 14 years old, and honestly I was always meeting new people just because of the things that I was doing but it was different. I didn’t understand at the time because I mean let’s face it, no one knows how important someone is going to be in your life right when you meet them. And for all that was really known we kinda seemed like opposites like on the outside, I guess. She was the epitome of everything I wanted to be like just because she was so much herself in place and time that really did everything in its power to force the contrary. There she was, like it wasn’t a struggle or even a challenge that she was up for. She would just be. It was almost eerie. To be around someone who wouldn’t rather just be in her own skin but who made it her mission each and everyday to just be. She had the most brilliant mind and the way that she viewed people was what the world should have been like and for all her light I was so much the opposite side of the spectrum I would wonder most days how we were such good friends. I fell in love with the other side of who I was because of how easy she made it to show her and that’s something i’ll never forgive because it came with a lot of pain and a lot of self growth because I was going pound for pound everyday with this internal battle that I wouldn’t have even started if it wasn’t for the light that she brought.

We recently caught up and I haven’t actually talked to her in I want to say a year let alone physically seen here in who knows how long but it all comes back right when I saw her and as we talked I realized that she had grown so much that it scared me because she never even could fathom how special she was that she had the kind of something that was going to influence the world if she let it. Like, I love Her for the same reason Disney world is my favorite place in the world.

  Just stay with me on this one, 

like I remember going when I was young and it was just the most magical place in the world to me like it’s Like being a little kid and really truly believing that Santa was coming to your house. Then to come downstairs and see the gifts that you knew were from like that’s the purest feeling that kind of happiness like being able to believe in magic and that’s what she does to me she makes everything come alive because of her passion. It’s amazing because she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and all she genuinely wants to do is share her love, her knowledge of whatever it is because she just wants you to feel it too even if its just for 5 minutes because she really truly believes in what she’s saying, and that’s magic.

I We talked for 2 or 3 hours and just sitting and talking to her honestly blew my mind because I had obviously assumed that we would get along, but I didn’t realize how much I missed her, but more so like how much i missed getting to see her become who she is. There is something that does bother me though I get the feeling that I really am seeing her for who she is and she’s trying to hide part of herself, but if she knew, like if she could see the way she can light up a room, or how she can say the most absolute right thing without a word at all its world changing. She is going to do such amazing things it almost scares me but i think that’s the beauty of it though she came in scaring me and that’s how she’ll go out.

Honesty is something that I’ve always admired in a person. For better or for worse if you were honest the masses are left with the purest perception of you so whether you’re liked, loved or even hated, its you. I think the reason I feel that way about honesty is because of my father, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that he was the most serious person Ive ever encountered in my life. Even at a young age I could feel it, almost like you could cut it with a knife, but I believe partly its because of how intelligent he is. I think that he doesn’t have the patience to deal with people who don’t understand something that he perceives to be so mundane. I don’t actually think I saw him treat other people this way but, my sister and I had to grow up a lot faster than he would have realized. Some people when they love someone they just want so badly for them to grasp every ounce of ambition or talent or anything really, that it doesn’t always manifest in a way that radiates love and affection. My dad loves harder than most and i think that he didn’t always know how to show it. If I’m being honest ive never been more scared of someone in my life. I used to just hide anywhere that I could so that i didn’t have to come into contact with him. I would have rather never seen him than not have been able to live up to his expectations that he would always raise once something was achieved it honestly made you not want to try at all. It’s really crazy to think about, we’ve known our parents our whole lives but we are only a fraction of what they’ve had going on for a good period of the time we are alive until we reach a point where we are supposed to be sent out on our own. When I was 13 years old my dad’s older brother died, and he was my uncle but there wasn’t a lot of memories of him in my life, not very distinct ones anyways, but it shattered my dad. He couldn’t explain and I couldn’t understand why someone that was never really mentioned to us that we never really saw could turn our world the other way on his axis from his passing. It always perplexed me, but what I did see was that my father was destroyed. Most people never see their father cry just because nothing really warrants them too especially when their child is young, but for a huge part of my life my father was the person I’d see cry the most and whenever he would cry I would cry. He is the strongest man that I know and I figured it had to be something earth shattering for this man to break down. I went on a mission to understand why it hurt so badly because I had a little brother and to be honest i hated him, he’s six years younger than me and we shared a room since I was maybe 7 or 8 and you could imagine going through the growing pains of adolescence mixed with the constantly advancing always changing psyche of a toddler. In short he was my least favorite person on the planet. Always wanting to go where i was always wanting to be like me and i just wanted him to leave me alone. My father would always get on us because he would be upset when he saw us fight which helped and hurt because we weren’t allowed to act naturally around him but we also always spent time together because he emphasized it. My dad and his brother taught me what it meant to be a brother just from seeing how hard it was for him to lose him. My little brother is my heart beat, an extension of me. If something ever happened to my brother I wouldn’t be able to breathe and it would pull the plug on any light i had in my entire body, just a complete shutdown. My father did shut down when it happened but he also took care of the essentials that we needed. Which are subjective and it’s different to different people but we always had clothes and food to eat, and that was more than a lot of people. Of course I wished he was someone I could just openly talk to, or someone that cared about the ongoings of his teenage kids’ relatively smooth lives but he had things he was dealing with. I hated him for a long time, and i think that i was just angry and when i had moved out it had given me a different perspective on my life. Those of us who are mad at our parents it’s usually because we think that they could have done better or been different and I think that we are just mad because we weren’t loved the way that we wanted to be loved so we don’t see the significance of how you were loved. Our parents are human too and when I realized how much my brother meant to me he did more than i ever could have to support a family with that sort of insurmountable pain. My father and I have the same name, and I think that he really takes pride in it, with me being his first born son, but we had a lot of clashes. The way that he is intelligent, just isn’t the way that I am and we didn’t understand each other, but one thing i do understand is that whether I agreed or not he p-ut these expectations on me to be the person that he could hang out with and go visit and talk about life with because his brother is gone. He never made it known to me that that was the goal and so we were working towards different things. I needed to find who i was going to be and he wanted me to already be on my way and thats okay because he worked very hard to give me the tools that i need to be someone that i can be proud of. I honestly never wanted to name my child after me because of my dad and that sounds kind of bad but its just how I felt I wanted my child to have his own identity and pave his own legacy. Now, I can’t wait to give our name to my child because I need to know him to know what kind of strength he comes from. He needs to understand the gravity of his intelligence and how he can do absolutely anything he wants too. I want him to know about the undeniable greatness that is in a name. I will never be able to thank you enough for the man I’ve become because I love myself more than most people think someone should. But it’s because you live in me too and I love you dad.

Everything was always better back when. Like our parents, honestly people just older than us like to talk about how back in their day this and back in their day that, and nobody wants to listen to that kind of stuff especially when its sole purpose is to shit on whatever we are currently into right now. Well. They might be onto something though. Obviously not the we aren’t doing anything worth wild stuff but the idea that when life was simpler, it was better. Not in like a worldly sense but in like a flashlight tag, cops and robbers kind of way. Like playing ghosts in the grave yard in an actual grave yard where you’d never even imagine stepping foot in now because your maturation into the world has equipped with you with the appropriate fears and responsibilities to where waiting until it’s pitch black and running around grass littered with 6 foot deep holes and slabs of concrete just waiting to ruin your night isn’t your idea of a great night. But even running into them then wouldn’t have ruined your night, but livened it up because all of you would team up to tease whoever was unfortunate to have a speed date with “in loving memory”. It’s those times that really shaped who we’ve become like the kind of memories that give you certain quirks and feelings about things in your adult life but they’re just as vague as they were fun. 20 questions was another one that was really popular when I was younger too. It single handedly created the move “ that wasn’t me that was my friend” when you said something a little too risky and it crashed and burned. It also saw you learning things about people like their favorite color or movie which just created a wild fire of more questions that starts the kind of friendship you have so long they’re who you’re remembering these times of your lives with. I think the most influential game of our time was truth or dare though, which I know is timeless but still. Like the secrets that came out to a group that could have started out as strangers but because of the game there’s no way it could have stayed that way. Or the stress of playing with your crush and sending your bestfriend cosmic sized brain waves that he or she never got right away just so that they’d dare you to kiss your crush. What’s even better is the splash of reality and nerves you get when the signal finally hits them and it’s your time to put up or shut up. Obviously getting older is better because it gives you more opportunities to meet people and do different things but the best times are the ones when you realize you’re having so much fun, and It could be something you’ve never ever done before but it’s because you feel like that teenager who doesn’t realize that the most memorable things in their life are happening right at that moment, thats just what you are. Just someone waiting, because everything was better back when it was simpler and we all should try to get back to that. One way or another.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton