They don’t tell you that you are going to start ordering pizza toppings that you previously never thought you would, specifically pineapple and green pepper, or Canadian bacon. It’s not because you feel obligated, but because you have eaten so much pizza with those toppings that pizza stopped tasting the same. You're never going to be able to make a normal amount of hashbrowns again, and if cooking them isn't spent bonding over our lives, they just won't cook right. Every single time that you eat frozen yogurt it will become a race, no matter who you eat it with because you’ve forgotten how to eat it slowly, and you have so much to say.
They don’t tell you that you’re going to spend a lot of time hiding notes in cookie containers, leaving voicemails at midnight, and sending heartfelt messages across the globe. Most of it is because you are constantly overflowing with appreciation, but also because you have a few too many thoughts and they don’t all fit into whatever you call the nice version of subtweeting. Oh, and trust me, you’re going to be doing a lot of that too. You're probably even going to write threats of affection, and follow through every single time.
They don’t tell you that you’re going to spend hours staring onto a stage, down a couch, across a piece of pizza bigger than your head, into eyes a little bit too warm and welcoming. And the time that you don’t spend doing that you will spend fighting about who is actually having the best night ever until you begrudgingly concede, and what you thought was a good night just ends up being a good morning the next day.
They don’t tell you that all of your favorite CDs in the box between the seats of your car will stop holding music alone and between every lyric of every song are memories that you may or may not want to keep thinking about, but you’re going to cry about them in your car anyway. You’re going to forget what it feels like in the driver’s seat, but with your feet pressed up against the dashboard, the passenger’s seat is going to feel like a pretty safe place. Even when the silences are a little bit too long, or the finger pointing gets a little bit too out of hand.
They don’t tell you that you are going to spend just as much time peeling hot glue of your skin as you do re-reading texts that seem a little bit too good to be true. In fact, almost everything will seem a little bit too good to be true: the nights sitting on the curb of the street, the video games you’re going to get a little bit too frustrated by, the sabotages that seem to be a little bit too insane, the fact that we still don't know if it was the heckin’ street days, the song that “keeps me believing the world’s not gone dead”.
What they don’t tell you about loving your friends is that you are going to spend the rest of your life trying to accurately portray how much they actually mean to you. You’re going to hug them deeper every single time because you know that eventually you won’t be able to walk into their living room on a Saturday morning, or meet up to traverse your hometown on a Saturday night. You’re going to write words upon words attempting to find the words that have been in your heart for so long, only to find that they wrote that song too, and it was way better than you could have written. You’re going to find yourself crying before you go to sleep because you miss those people terribly, whether they have left or they are about to. Every single minute is going to feel like a countdown to a moment that is going to come eventually, but you try to stave it off by filling the time with gallons of chocolate milk, or walking to Casey’s, or laughing at Game Grumps or hiding as many tea bags on their person as possible.
What they don’t tell you about loving your friends is that it will be the best and worst thing that has ever happened to you. Every time they are around your heart is going to overflow and every time they are away you’re going to wish that they were there.
What they don’t tell you about being the luckiest human in the world, is that it means knowing the best humans in the world. And that is something they can never tell you about, because you need to meet these people for yourself to figure it all out.
