Forever Young

Art by Trey King (2018 archive)

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        He was the only person I had met within our suffocating Ohioan village that wanted to live as badly as I did. Two kids much too concerned with running out of time and Friday night plans to ever take a second to think about anything. It was addicting, him and I, in a perpetual state of dance and laughter, spoon-feeding ourselves dopamine and the promise of staying forever young. Someone of that nature was hard to forget. And so I thought of him. 

        Even amidst our strangerhood, he intersected my thoughts. And I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I hoped he was doing well. I prayed that in another life, we were still the kids we used to be. Regardless of not having talked in over a year, he still meant something. Maybe just for a second, we’d have a moment of the old us, doing the things we used to do, talking the way we used to, living simply as the people we both recognize. We’d meet eyes and mutually agree that we still crave it. And that agreement, somehow, would be enough. But I’m only so bold. Excessive. To admit such nostalgia and longing to an old friend after losing touch felt too… vulnerable. Only, I now have to stomach the fact that I didn’t say anything, questioning if swallowing my pride for a moment of raw honesty would have been enough to prevent a noose from being tied around his neck in the garage I had spent a summer licking popsicles in.

        Shotgun by George Ezra blasted out of the speaker strapped to his back. We were sleepy & sunburnt, with a whole lot of nothing to do amongst the cornfields, churches, and baseball diamonds all somewhat caught in a hazy 80s daydream. We loved it. We bumped over the railroad tracks that split our town right down the gut. My bike tires hitting the rocky chasms made my blue raspberry slushie slip out of my hand. A few pedals ahead of me, he was texting with both hands off the bike. I was fighting for my life to have two of my right hand fingers clutch my drink while the other three grip the handlebar. 

        We left our driveways into a wasteland. Eight miles out and all that surrounds us is dirt and crops. I always envied the kids that lived in town. They had the whole world at their fingertips. And they were good at riding bikes. 

        We threw our bikes to the side, scouting for tree branches that could hold our hammocks. He climbed up into his, I into mine, and we let the minutes pass. Eighth grade had come and gone so swiftly, and high school was on the horizon. I was miserable. I was never good at endings or beginnings or anything in between, affected too much by the whiplash of it all. My stomach twisted itself into a million knots over the thought of the change coming up on us so quickly. I looked up to the voice above me. 

        “Do you think it’ll change us much?” I blurted. 

        He paused for a minute. “That depends on how much you want it to.”

        I picked at my nails as I whispered, “What if I don’t want it to at all?”

        I don’t know when we became friends or why it happened. But truthfully, he was a constant in my life that I looked forward to day in and day out. The late day sun beat on, illuminating the grove, giving way to the light dancing across his face as he peeked over the side of his hammock. He was beautiful in the way that boys at our age wanted to be: defined but spry. So much in his face told you things were going to be ok. 

        “I think we’ll always be a little bit of the same.” He smiled softly before turning back into the comfort of lying in his cocoon. We stayed like that until we could hear the hum of the mosquitos and the baseball stadium lights flicker off in the distance. 

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        Isaac Newton is a fool. For every action, there might be an opposite reaction, but I’ll be damned if it’s always equal. I shifted in my high top stool next to him, turning my attention away from the graphs of motion. Beside me he sat, eyes latched onto his school iPad screen, watching last Friday’s football highlights. He had shown me them at least five times. 

        I nudged him and teased, “You know, that doesn’t look an awful lot like our lab assignment.” 

        He rolled his eyes. “This class will have no impact on me when I’m playing college football,” still paying no mind to anything but the jersey numbers on the screen.

        I sighed, shaking my head. “But you do know you have to get the grade if you even want to play this week, let alone in college, right?” 

        He was smart but he never cared. He never wanted to waste a second on school when he could be doing anything else, so he stuck to football and fun while his grades crumbled. I watched and worried. He finally turned his gaze to me, staring for a long moment before he offered up a smile, acknowledging my concern. 

        “Oh, I forgot I wanted to show you something.” He flipped over to his Spotify app and typed in Forever Young by Lil Yachty. He saw my eyebrow perk up in questioning and laughed in response. 

        “Every time I hear it, I don’t know, it just makes me think of you. I think you’ll like it.” 

        I laughed at the absurdity of the sentiment being tied to a popular rapper, but ate it up nonetheless. So that night I listened to it. And listened. And listened. And listened. That same night, I told him I liked it, he told me he liked me, and we continued on the same as we always had. I continued to listen, letting it become anthemic that evening. The melody carried me through the months of thinking about turning a dear friend into something more. I didn’t think we could ever go on being forever young, and that was the problem. I wanted something more, the bittersweet of coffee growing blacker and filing taxes, but he couldn’t think past turning 21. 

        The air was the type of stuffy that could only be found amongst brace-faced teenagers flinging glitter and hips on the night of sophomore year homecoming. There’s just something euphoric to 15 year olds about exchanging hot breaths and jumping on each other’s toes. I found myself slick with sweat in the middle of the dance floor when I felt the tempo slow; my heart rate doubled. 

        Thinking out Loud by Ed Sheeran began to play for the slow dance. Eyes flitted around the room as everyone realized the shift. They only had seconds. Boyfriends, girlfriends, friends, and strangers alike grabbed each other like their life depended on it. I found myself alone, whipping around, scouring the floor for any figures that had been discarded or simply hadn’t been quick enough to find a partner. A few had already left the area, hiding their embarrassment with the facade of getting a drink or going to the bathroom. 

        Standing under the disco ball, I laughed at the irony. I was but a few steps on my walk of shame when somewhere from behind he grabbed my hand, pulling me back into the thick of it, landing me in his arms. He flashed his 1000-watt smile before spinning me and dropping me low to the ground with a dip. I was lifted back up into reality, pausing for a second to get my footing and catch my breath. 

        “You aren’t allowed to dance alone tonight,” he stated. 

        We shared a smile, and I thought maybe a tear would trickle down my face at how grateful I was for him and his ongoing kindness. Despite our distance, we were always in tune. He still noticed me and swept me up. He turned me around and let me feel like something to someone. I still have the Photo Booth pictures of that night. 

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        We once pulled a mattress out of a ditch on a country road and jumped on it until we couldn’t breathe. We broke into a cemetery, climbed trees, and wandered aimlessly around town. We long-boarded at night and had bonfires, and talked about the end of the world. We celebrated Friday night wins with a tower of McChickens and music over car drives. 

         Fast forward to junior year and our lives had zigged and zagged into a pattern we didn’t quite recognize. By senior year we were just friendly faces passing in the hallway with some stories to tell. Then, graduation day came, enveloping everyone in the cataclysmic doom of what to do next. I hugged him in my cap and gown. We held on for a little bit longer than needed. Our embrace felt like we might always be a little bit of the same. It was the last one we had.

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        On February 22nd, 2024, at 7:30 pm, I was sobbing on the bathroom floor of the National Museum of African American Music. The property on Broadway couldn’t dream of a state anything close to silence, but in that exact moment, I swear I could hear my lungs deflate as I gasped for air between cries. My weighty phone sat in my hand. The screen lit up with a little blue bubble that easily held the words, “He killed himself today.” A suicide notice via iMessage. Modernity has failed us. My ears rang and the tile I sat on became cold beneath me. The space felt sterile. Everything seemed otherworldly. In the moment of observation, a wave of guilt hit me. Do I even have the right to be crying the way I am right now? I leaned my head back against the wall, racking my brain. What was our last conversation? What was the last thing we did together? God, I hadn’t known him since high school. That was 3 years ago. I couldn’t pin the pit in my stomach to loss or to regret. That was somehow worse. My sobs only grew.

        On Sunday, February 25th, 2024, I turned 21. It was the first time I had ever cried on my birthday. He wouldn’t turn 21. How thankful I was to have a life, one that I liked to live. 

        On Friday, March 1st, 2024, I was gripping my steering wheel, checking how much further we had to go. I was driving to Florida with a friend for our spring break, the kiss of salt so near I couldn’t be bothered to follow the highway’s speed limit signs. Our windows were cracked a little, letting the too chilly breeze whip my hair into more knots. My phone began to buzz, snapping me out of my dream state. I assumed it was my mom checking in on the drive, but instead, the name on the screen claimed an old girlfriend from high school. We hadn’t talked in over a year. I turned to my friend in my passenger seat with a confused frown before I swiped the slider to answer, hesitant to hear her voice. 

        “Hey girl!” I said in a much too cheery way, overcompensating for my uncertainty of the situation.

        “Hey.” Her voice dropped to a tone I hadn’t heard before. “I just wanted to call you to let you know that I went to the service today.”

         My chest tightened. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make the 7 hour drive back home from Nashville when I had already planned on spring break, so I dismissed the memorial, keeping it locked away in the back of my head a safe distance away from my heart. My eyes glazed over within a second. I wasn’t there, but she was. She now lived in Oklahoma, 12 hours and 30 minutes away from the high school we graduated in and she went to the funeral. I was on my way to drink margaritas and get tan on a beach for a week. I swallowed, unable to choke anything out before she could. 

        “I just wanted to let you know….it was beautiful. And, I know you couldn’t make it, but you should know….you were in the pictures.” 

        My cheeks flushed and my nostrils burned as tears began to crawl down my face. 

        My breath caught as I let out a pathetic, “What?” begging for her to say the words again.

        “You were in the pictures at the memorial.” She started crying herself, letting out a laugh of relief, before continuing. “You guys—you just looked so happy in them. And I just needed to tell you that.” 

        My eyes burned. I laughed to the windshield as I inhaled and exhaled, letting everything pour out of me. The road ahead was a blurry mess and snot dripped down from my nose, but I didn’t care. I gripped the phone like a lifeline in one hand and the wheel with the other. It was real. We were something. Someone looked at the timeline of his life and saw me in it. Perhaps it was just for a second. But it was enough for me to know that it didn’t just exist in my head. It wasn’t too long ago. It mattered. She and I talked on the phone for what could have been forever, reminiscing through our broken hearts and promising each other things we couldn’t possibly get back to before wishing each other well. 

        I sat in silence for a few moments after that phone call, breathing to the hum of the engine that needed replacing. My dear friend sat in quiet consideration beside me. I looked over to her with a smile of sympathy for the ugly and the quiet she just endured: 

        “I want to show you a song.” I turned towards my driver’s window where a line of lively orange ran across the sky, melting into a pink lemonade. 

        The beat came in, and I was 14 again. Forever Young by Lil Yachty crept out of my speakers, and I sang every lyric like it was holy, my mind breezing through every memory with him in my youth. I continued to laugh and cry like a mad woman as the song sang on at the highest volume my car would allow, fanning the flame of memories I had forgotten long ago. 

        Now I’ll remember to check in on the people I haven’t seen in three years. I‘ll tell them how I still think of them when the clouds cover campus. How the air seems to carry the dust blowing off the combines we’d pass as we’d drag our feet back to school in the fall. I’ll go home in July and feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. I’ll wonder if the shingles on the roof of his home tucked away off Wilson Street have sunburnt themselves into a lighter shade. 

        I don’t know a lot about grief, but somewhere, beneath layers of wrinkles and scars, there lives a boy I once had the privilege of sharing the same space and time with. So I smile to the sky, knowing that he’ll be remembered as forever young, and with him, I think, a part of me, too.

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