Far and Wide

Seven

Last night I was browsing through my social media when it hit me, we live in a sad society. Every post my eyes scrolled past was plagued with the same few words:

depression

anxiety

teenage suicide

I am sixteen years old, merely a teenager. Now is the time for making mistakes, getting into trouble and doing all the things adults consider "reckless". Now is not the time to be sobbing alone in your room, praying that the T.V drowns out your cries for help so your parents don't hear you. Now is the time to be hoping to God that the sounds of your parents fighting masks the creaking of the door as you slither into the night.

Last year I called my best friend every night for a month. It was the same conversation every time all about a boy who frankly didn't give a damn. Now is the time to have your heart broken, but there is a difference between having your heart broken and being heart broken. When you have your heart broken you can still pick up the shards off of the cracked pavement and put them back together. It will never be perfect but we will sure as hell try.

This is the time to be making memories and when that day comes at the end of senior year and life is about to rip you by the hair and thrust you into a world you have never known I don't want to reminisce over the times I sat in my room, shadows dancing across the walls, the only light coming from the blue glow of my phone as the tears rushed down my face. I don't want to sit back and recall the times I woke up worried my best friend was not going to.

I want to instead treasure the nights when the missed calls from my mother began to pile up on my phone. The times we ran so fast our hearts raced right out of our chests long after we had stopped. I don't want our last memories to be I saved her life. I want our last memories to be I saved her ass from the cops. Because to me that sure as hell sounds like a better story. These are the stories people say in ten years won't matter, but what happens when they aren't stories and instead are illusions we only wished for?