My Trip to Seattle
When we realize our dreams, how do we let go of the pursuit. For the summer, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to "grow up," and in a way, I have found my own answer on a highway in Seattle.
The week of July 4th, I took a cross-country Redeye straight from my internship to visit my best friend. It was our first summer apart in years, so naturally I was curious to what her life looked like in this new city. She grew up in pseudo-suburbia while I was exiled to horse country; needless to say, we both always had big dreams of leaving home.
We had met by chance in French class back in seventh grade when the teacher sat us next to each other. Over the course of the next seven years, we became partners in crime. We worked the same terrible fast-food job, lied to strangers about being sisters, went hiking through the woods at three AM for no apparent reason, and convinced each other to DM random guys on Instagram in a Target parking lot. Of course, the twist is that we went to different high schools, and all of our memorable adventures happened during the slim margin of three months.
Last summer, I realized that it would be our last in our hometown. We had woken at an ungodly time to walk around the neighborhood. As the sun rose, with cups of green tea in our hands, we sat on the porch of my house for the last time. Overlooking the cul-de-sac of retirees escaping city life, I started to wonder what would become of us, become of these little moments. Would they start to slip through my fingers over the years? Referring to summers with broad adjectives (Young! Hot! Wild!) rather than recalling the special moments that had given the time meaning in the first place. I knew that in a year or two, we’d pluck our roots from the ground, finding a new place and people to call home. In my sleep-deprived thought, I had burned my tongue on the tea.
Without warning, a year passed, and I was there. Mousy-haired, greasy, sweaty, and hungry in the new place she called home — Seattle. By the time we arrived at her apartment, it was two am, and I felt like I had walked into some unreal fever dream. If you don’t remember the Disney movie Sixteen Wishes, the main character was given this box of sixteen candles that could make any wish come true. One of her wishes was to be treated like an adult. So, in a flash, the sixteen-year-old girl transformed into a twenty-one-year-old woman. That is how it felt being in her apartment. No parents to tell us to go to bed, or sisters asking to get Starbucks. She had created a life for herself, independent of the one she lived on the East Coast.
I woke up the following day, and so the trip ensued. We toured her workplace, favorite coffee shops, and vintage stores. I had met her co-workers, friends, and roommates. The trip was the perfect blend of sightseeing, shopping, and watching Star Wars (a tradition at this point). Despite having an amazing time, there was this fear that this might be the rest of our lives. We play catch-up together for a week, show off our shiny new lives, then get back on an airplane with no legroom (and a whistleblower), returning to life as it was. I started to play out the Reddit storyline of a Bridezilla insisting on her childhood best friend booking a three-thousand-dollar ticket to Cabo. The ridiculousness of my fears made it all feel silly to grieve this perfectly healthy, loving friendship.
On my final night in Seattle, we sat on the roof of her apartment. Across from us was a group of young adults celebrating something. We both started to create these storylines about lost lovers and best friends. We romanticized the freedom, the adulthood of these random people. Out of the blue, she said, “you know we probably looked like that last night.” Last night was the fourth of July when she and I had attended a kick-back on one of her friend’s roofs — exactly like the one across from us now. I realized that this dark cloud that had hung over me was not the anxiety about our friendship but about becoming an adult. For the past two years, I waited for adulthood to feel like I thought it would. But it never hit me until I realized I was grieving its slow creep into my life. I realized that I was not losing my friend, rather, the life I once had and the people I shared it with.
At nine twenty-six PM the following day, she drove me to the airport, windows down, playing “Sultans of Swing” by the Dire Straits. I started to get nostalgic for the summer we graduated. Bumping between grad parties of people we had barely met on the backroads of Virginia, getting up early enough to open up a local Chipotle, and small moments of hopefulness for the fall. One night, we sat in the dark, whispering our secret dreams of the future to each other. I do not remember what I said, but at that moment, nine twenty-six PM in Seattle, I knew she had found her first dream.
I knew in my heart that if she had stayed, I would have stayed a kid, complacent in my dreams, hoping for just one more summer of irresponsibility. Saying I hated my fast-food job, yet returning out of fear, that if I took my first desk job now, my fight against growing up would cease. Despite missing her, I am grateful that she left because it freed me from the notion that we could stay like that forever—girls. A lot of the most beautiful things in life are fleeting: sunsets, stars, and summer. For the past seven years, I have had a friendship that was solid, something that distance and trifling time zones can never shake. What was truly fleeting was my white-knuckled grasp on girlhood, now something that no longer belonged to me.
Thank you for reading. This is different from what I usually write about, and I am still trying to find my voice. I hope I could at least understandably convey the complex grief of growing up, at least a little bit. Also thank you for 20 subscribers! It is insane that there are people out there who want to read what I have to say (that are not my parents (hi dad!)). If you are interested in reading more, subscribe down below.