What could have been.

We all grow up doing pretty much the same things. But sometimes after you reach your twenties being the irresponsible adults you were destined to be, you meet someone. Someone who makes you wish you knew them since high school.

To skip class just so you could read Emily Dickinson and Whitman. To meet up everyday after school and talk about how one day you will graduate and go backpacking through Europe. Someone to knock your head against the lockers every time you go dreamy eyed and weak in your knees when….the cliché high school drama. Someone who knows you spill more food than you eat. Someone your mom knows better than she knows you.

Someone to binge watch cartoons and all the TV shows that are now ancient. To sneak out at night through the bedroom window. Whispering so that your parents don’t wake up. To drive to your favourite spot. The lights from the town twinkle in the valley below. You lie down on the grass and look up at the stars. Side by side, like that is where you were meant to be.

I wish I knew him when all that mattered was the canvas and the palette in my hand. When every emotion had a shape, a word, a colour. Every dream had wings. When every laugh was carefree.

To spend countless hours on Internet chat rooms. Hanging out in Record stores. All those mixed tapes. My room, from when I was less anal about where the sweaty clothes should be. Nirvana, Springsteen, U2 on the radio. I can picture him there in that dump loving it every bit as much as I did. If my life were to be anything like a John Hughes movie he would be there holding a boombox outside my window. If I get to change one thing it won’t be wishing I didn’t barf during that debate in school. It would be to grow up with him.

It is too late now for endless conversations over telephones with cords or box TV sets with musicals and black and white movies. It is too late for notes exchanged in school libraries. Now we can’t spend time by that stream skipping stones like tomorrow is a distant dream. We meet as we part, the memories we share are the one page that was from a book that could have been.