Sliding around the back of a small Toyota pick up truck with the lush floral taste of Bombay Sapphire mixed with cheap gas station orange juice. Seventeen saw blurred street lights and beer pong games in strangers yards.

I asked plenty of questions that red solo cups didn’t have the answers to. But I kept trying— as if the cheap plastic would transform into a wishing well. I don’t think I was alone in that.

Friday nights would invite hooligan activity as my friends and I would bike around the city in the dead of night. I wonder how many streets I coasted down as I let my feet rest on the pedals— the night air carrying us along.

Those nights were preceded by days of nausea or hunger pangs. I hadn’t yet unraveled the mystery of my stomach ailments— and most of my waking hours were spent in a fog. On the rare days I experience it now— I wonder how I managed for seven years.

The heady rush of first romances and exquisite nights. The awkward pauses and expeditions for deeper meaning when experience is what mattered most.

The external pursuit of identity that would circle back to quiet, internal realizations.

A normalized calm where they had been choppy seas. We can forget as time smooths away the rough edges like pebbles on the beach.

We forget— even when we don’t mean to. Memory is tricky that way. It’s an amorphous cloud we imagine to be an unchanging solid. A statue instead of a river.

We ride along the currents of a story we actively tell ourselves.