Don't Forget to Write

Pre-Game

I came out of the bathroom freshly showered and dressed, Bruno Camila, and Diane all had red solo cups in hand. Camila walked within breathing space of me as I entered the kitchen "Here's your whiskey," she said, almost in a whisper. "want anything with it? Coke? Sprite?"

"Nope, just like this is good."

"That's gross."

"Soda is bad for you ya know."

"And alcohol isn't?"

"Of course not. Alcohol is medicine for the soul."

"So, your soul is sick?" She asked.

Karen and Moose showed up at our door at that moment. Each greeted me with a warm embrace. Moose went immediately into the living room and starting chatting and joking with the girls and Bruno, being his sociable self. I took Karen's coat and put it in my room. "So are you and Mustafa, like, together?"

"Me and Moose?" she laughed. "No. we're not into each other like that. I don't think Moose is the romantic type. I've never seen him with another girl or another guy."

"Maybe he's asexual?" I asked.

Karen laughed at first, but then straightened her face and said, "well, actually. Maybe he is." We both shrugged. "What's this?" She asked, picking up of pages on my desk from the story I had been writing this morning, before I got locked out of my apartment, fell in a swimming pool, and had to sit on the cold marble steps for hours. I sniffled back some mucous, and wondered if I was getting sick.

"That's nothing," I said, a little too quickly."

"Nothing, eh?"

"Yes, nothing."

"Doesn't seem like nothing," she read the top of the first page, "Seems to me like a story or something..."

I pulled the papers out of her hands, "Alright, that's enough. I don't share my stuff."

"So, it was a story? I didn't know you wrote!"

"Neither do most people, I keep it to myself."

"Can I read something."

"No."

"Please?"

"Maybe sometime in the future," I said, shuffling the pages into a thick folder with other nonsense stories just like it.

"Yes! And don't worry, I won't tell anybody. We can keep it our little secret."

Just then the door to my room opened. "Hey," Camila said, "we were wondering where you went."

"Hey Camila," Karen said.

"Karen." Silence as they looked at each other. Was this one of those girl things that I didn't yet understand? "Got the day off from that bar?"

"Yes, Bob gave me the night off. Cute costume, the dress looks good on you."

"Thank you. What are you? Like a pirate or something?" Camila asked.

"What? Of course she's a pirate," I interrupted. "Look at her. She's got the baggy clothes, the boots, the bandana, the big gold hoop in her ear... she even has an eye patch! What else could she possibly be? Ya silly goose." Neither of them said anything. "Alright, to the party?" We joined the rest of the group out in the living room just as a couple of friends from the soccer team strolled in, and we all drank and told stories and jokes.

Nobody had their phone out, a comforting sight. Using your phone is like smoking a cigarette; it can be addicting, time-consuming, and ostracizing. Smoking was better, though, because it gave you a head buzz, and even though it did pull one out of a social setting, it oftentimes transported the smoker into a new social group with other smokers. The brilliant conversations had on the front porch of your local bar between a group of strangers sharing a lighter and nicotine could rival your favorite podcaster and guest combination. Something about the nicotine makes thoughts easier to articulate. And the people next to you are killing themselves slowly just like you, there's no judgment, and thus no care for treading lightly; any topic is up for conversation and debate with much less worry of offending somebody.

Cigarettes trapped you by tying you to a desire, a need, to constantly get that nicotine in your blood, phones worked in a similar way. They were "cyber leashes" to those of us who have ever had a problem with spending too much time on their phone (virtually everybody). They pinned you down, forced you to be responsive to a piece of glass, obedient to the distant people on your social media, and never too far away from a power outlet. We were in a way living more openly, but our complete openness to the world has also made us closed, afraid of judgment, aiming to please everybody on the feed rather than be true to ourselves and to the people we care about.

If I had a conversation with a stranger at a bar, he could tell me about how he hated his dad, but respected him in a weird way. He could tell me about the beatings and the abuse, but also about the wise advice and values. he could tell me about his life, good, bad, and ugly. That story, those feelings, were genuine, because I had heard it in his voice and seen it in his eyes, and the story wouldn't go farther than the bar in which we sat. It was real. As real as the drink in my hand. But he could never say things like that on social media for everybody else to see. Honesty can't fully exist out there in the ocean of information we call the internet. The truth is not pleasant, or friendly, or kind. It is oftentimes a dark, cruel, ugly son of a bitch that you keep in a cellar, only to be showed to those who won't pass judgment, like your closest friends, or a stranger at the bar who will never see you again anyway. That kind of honesty doesn't exist in the perfect memory of the internet.

Moose told a story that put me in tears of laughter, and for a second I felt young and innocent again. Before I had a phone and before I smoked my first cigarette. When I would sit with my cousins at the kid's table and we would drink too much soda, or sometimes too much of our parents' wine, and we would speak nonsense between gasping breaths of laughter, making noises and faces to get the person next to us laugh. Those noises and faces and nonsensical phrases evolved as we got older into stories and jokes, which I imagine is how the first languages were invented; just cavemen making more and more complicated noises in attempts to make the other ones laugh, until eventually the noises turned into words and the faces turned into expressions. I felt nostalgia - I'm not sure what for. Nostalgia is a weird sensation, sometimes it's exact. A certain cup of coffee can bring you back to your parents' couch on Christmas Eve of 2002 sitting between your cousins while Home Alone played on the TV and mom was baking sugar cookies. But sometimes, it's just a general feeling. This time it was general, like a reminder that once, long ago, things were good and I was pure. Life was new and exciting and the world seemed fresh with possibilities and my mind was filled with ideas. I was feeling nostalgia for that specific feeling, not a specific moment. This feeling we used to have all of the time as kids, knowledge that anything truly was possible, and everything was beautiful. But now we can only grasp at the feeling in thin moments like these when we can remember that we once had it. It's worth it, though, to know that we can still feel that good, or just have a memory of feeling that good, even if it's only sometimes.