As a teenager, you feel invincible. It seems as though life obviously has a long winding path for you. You can seemingly map out your route to world domination with only imagining minimal bumps in the road and no one can tell you otherwise. All of the episodes of Criminal Minds where they always caught the bad guy lulled me into this false sense of security.
I grew up in a small town where most people go to school together from K-12. Most of the time you have the same friends for your whole school career. Bad things rarely seem to happen in our little bubble, and when they do they seem to blow over pretty quickly when you are watching from a distance.
My junior year of high school slapped my little midwest happy-go-lucky attitude right out of me.
In your late high school years, you are the most important person in your own mind. All that matters is your ACT score or your band audition, getting into colleges and getting your slice of the metaphorical life cake.
When I was sixteen and seventeen two of my friends tragically passed away during our junior year of high school.
When someone close to you dies, certain things have new meanings. I remember always looking for their cars. For the first year, any red sedan or blue Subaru was investigated to no avail. Any blaring sirens gave me the imminent feeling that someone close to me was hurt. Car crashes meant that someone had to be dead because if my friend didn't make it out alive, there was no way that the rest of the world could.
At eighteen and at the one year anniversary my grief and I distance a little. I am able to look back and see the rapid deterioration between my friends and me. We were angry and sad and I don't think anyone truly knew what to do with us out of their own fear. We found ways to heal and we survived.
Pushing towards nineteen now, I wonder if they would even recognize the person that I have become. There are still shades of the old me in who I am now, but I'm not sure I would recognize who I was a year ago. There are parts of me that I miss, but I don't want them back. Who I was a year ago symbolizes who they were, and I want to embody all that they would be. I think they would be proud of who I have become, just as I would have been proud of who they had become.
