It’s hard to imagine bouncing back, as I stare at the gray sky and my freshly emptied matcha.
I used to think I wouldn’t. I used to let the lows become the highs because there wasn’t an upside; there wasn’t someone who would sit on the bottom with me—well, there were, but nobody I allowed to sit there with me. Nobody who I wanted to be there with me.
It’s been years since that scared little girl thought it would be that way forever.
I found the people whom she would let sit there with her.
First, I stumbled into a more colorful life, my love for pink deepened and paralleled by a girl’s passion for red. She taught me how friendship could be more, how it could be honest, how it could feel to let someone sit next to me. Someone who taught me my heart was supposed to ache with love.
Two years later, I found laughter and another person oddly similar to her, but in a different way. A girl whom I saw myself in, a girl who also loves my favorite TV show, a girl who sees me as I want to be seen, and who I think is simply cool in a way that people aren’t anymore.
Shortly after that, but essentially simultaneously, I met a girl so kind I never wanted to leave her side, a girl who is encapsulated in the word beautiful, a girl who smiles like Gatsby and “understands you just as you want to be understood.”
These are the people who taught me that saying “I love you” to your best friends is normal, who can tell when I need a hug, who I want to drive around with for hours.
Who taught me comfortable silence instead of awkward silence.
The people who remind me that life is forgiving because no matter how bad it gets, they are there. The universe’s apology for tears.
I guess we could drift, but it doesn’t feel like that. Which everyone thinks, but these are the people I would put in the effort for, the people I wouldn’t feel shy reaching out to even if it’d been months, the people I will reconnect with when we’re home for Christmas break.
I like to think I will always remember junior year this way: the year I met three of my closest friends, the year that was shaping up to be horrid and instead was wonderful, the year I loved and felt loved back.
They taught me that my love comes out in words. Not actions or art or looks, but words. Notes app scribbles like annotations in the margins of my heart. Gratitude that I can’t quite explain until the night falls, and all I am left with are shadows of the day, memories of my favorite people.
My matcha may be empty, and I may be approaching rock bottom, but I’m not afraid of it anymore.
I forgive life for being brutal at times, because life gave me them.
