We sat like stones in an empty parking lot. My life flashed back fifteen years. How free it felt to be young. The kind of youth that sits in your chest and fills you with solace and freedom. I crave it like the cigarette we share. You ask me when life got scary how I walked through the flames that tore my life apart. I tell you how I became them. And I love that we are still the same in certain ways. I can see the hue in your pupils before you even begin to cry and you catch me looking away every time. I want to be seventeen and free of grief. I want to be careless and hang onto girlhood like we never lost it. You ask me why we had to grow up so fast and I remind you that it wasn’t a fucking choice, but somehow we do it well. We hug and I swear to never let go because my spirit always holds onto a piece of you. As I pull out of the parking lot, I can see you smiling and crying in my rear view mirror as your headlights fade down Bennett road. Life knuckles through the softest parts of us- we sit like stones engulfed in a grief that has no explanation. We took silence in a space that once hosted laugher. We let time play like a fucking movie and I never want to get to the ending. If this is the saddest part I’m glad I get to share it with a piece of girlhood that survived flames and hardened pieces that I once swore would break. They never did. They never did. They never did. -AMT ©️