8 p.m. and I’m in my best friend’s kitchen. I bring her the jeans I mended, thread and needle pressing through stiff denim, because they were too big. “For Christmas,” I say. The tree is decorated. Fragments of childhood are sprinkled through the house: the couch we binge watched The Summer I Turned Pretty on, the backyard we tried to play croquet during the pandemic in, the dining table she opened her birthday presents on last year.
We’re trying to heat gyoza in the microwave. My childhood friends are cluttered around the kitchen, laughing because I’m doing it wrong. Together, we exist not just as our present realities but as every version of ourselves we have lived. With them, I am seven, on the play structure, spinning. With them, I am 12, in Lake Arrowhead, scared because the family dog is running towards me. I’m 17, in an airport in North Carolina, making TikToks. We’re eight, at hotpot, yelling at my brother for mixing the broths.
Tonight, it’s PowerPoint night; we are recapturing all that has happened over the last quarter. I am debriefed on the friend who’s a quadrupedal and the roommate we’re pretty sure stole a water filter. I want to say I used to know what you would eat for lunch the next day, now you walk me through your life slide by slide. Once, we cried together in math. Next year, I think, I’ll finally be convinced to give up English for computer science, and you’ll be across the sea walking through grey fog and ivy-covered stone buildings. Next year, I think, I’ll still be here, watching the highlight reel of your life, trying to reincarnate the past.
On the drive back, we pass a tree toppled on the sidewalk strip, roots threaded through each other, veins knotted together and coming undone. Once, our lives were intertwined in this manner: I could not decide where one story ended and the others began. Next year, I think, I’ll still be here, watching your life slowly untangle from mine.
I do not wish for my childhood friends to be fossils, remnants of who I once was. How to say I do not know what your dorm room smells like or which dining hall you prefer, but I still remember how you hung the posters above the bed in your room and the creatures you liked to doodle in the margins of your notebook. How to say I will never meet another person who understood me at seven spinning on the play structure because the floor was chicken noodle soup.
My mother, too, shares my concern. She is afraid, I think, that I have grown too fast and too far, that I might not come back. “I blinked, and now you’re gone. How could I explain that I never wanted you to grow up and go off to college — even if it were the greatest school in the world?” she texts me on a Friday. I want to tell her I did not know growing up would be this unearthing of sorts, pulling roots from the earth, bruised soil, raw, woven veins. I can still see the stain of dirt under my fingernails. Instead, I send a heart emoji.
When I return for break, my grandmother tells me that when my father left for college she smelled his pillow every night for three weeks.
Weeks after PowerPoint night, my best friend loses her home to the Los Angeles fires. I cannot understand loss as she does, cannot grasp it in my palms, make it tangible, say, look at all that was once here, unrooted, our lives slowly coming untangled. And yet I want to say all of the pieces of you since 9th grade are still alive in me; the version of you who only shopped at Hollister for jeans and dyed her hair pink at the tips just for it to get washed away from two weeks of swim practice still exists in the phrases I say and the restaurants I like. A person, sometimes, can be a time capsule too.