In the one photo taken from my Best Friend’s bachelor party,

I am the only person not smiling.

If anyone asks, I’ll blame it on being the DD of the group.

 

I’ve learned that I tend to freeze in stressful situations.

 

Until then I hadn’t hugged my boys in over a year.

For three years they were my everyday

and now we had three days to catch up on four years of new life.

Long story short, I didn’t know what to say.

I wanted to explain to them that I was still frozen.

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August 4th, 2017

My Best Friend is sitting next to me on the couch.

We are drinking whatever Bacardi I had on hand mixed with Coke

because we're not that creative.

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Tomorrow is college graduation.

And although I’ve spent the last three years working towards it,

I’ve spent the last five weeks praying it wouldn’t happen.

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Looking at him I can't imagine not seeing him tomorrow.

Can't imagine not having this every day. 

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In a couple of hours we will just be yesterday.

And I'm certain I will never be this happy again.

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I don’t know how to explain all this, so I say nothing.

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November 8th, 2021

My Best Friend’s wedding reception ended a few hours ago.

It has been four years since we have all been together

and maybe it’s the drinks or the edible I took but

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nothing feels real.

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My Smart Friend and Hot Friend return from drinking all the alcohol in a two-mile radius.

As we settle in, this being our last night together sinks in. 

I can see my Hot Friend begin to cry.

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He and me and smart friend are all frozen.

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Right now, we are not poets or soldiers or engineers.

Just a family of boys

who don’t know when they’ll see each other again.

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And I think of a million things to say but I can’t say anything.

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I wanted to tell him;

I have been crying about this same thing every day since 2017.

That back home I have no one to stay up all night with.

No one who will smoke and listen to Taylor Swift with me.

No one who’ll eat the random food I decide to cook in a moment of mania.

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I want to say

I hate feeling like all the love in my life moved across the country.

Thinking I aged out of freedom.

That I’ve visited campus over 20 times since then and it’s not the same.

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And I’ll cry inside from Deerfield Beach back to Tampa over the faces I haven’t seen in years.

All the time we’d share together we would never see again.

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How could I explain that my heart dared to break on the happiest day ever?

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These people used to be my every day.

In a couple of hours we will just be yesterday.

And I will go back home wishing I could stretch my hands across the country 

and hug them all at once. 

I wish I knew of a way to make us all young and free and infinite again.  

But how do you stuff seven years of “I love yous”, four years of change, adulting, a pandemic, work, marriage, and all this scary life into a few days?

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I don’t know how to explain all this, so I say nothing.

And we remain frozen.

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Smart Friend says, “Go ahead and cry man… it’s okay.”

And we do. And we hug. And we laugh.

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And my heart feels understood for the first time in four years.

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Sometimes you love in ways you can’t always say.

But the love is always there.

In the silence, in the frowns.

In the laughs, in the drinks, in the dances.

In the moments spent apart.

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