The Way It Was

(This is an excerpt from a story idea I've been working with lately. It's loosely based on my high school years with my best friend.)

It was back when we listened to Dashboard Confessional and Death Cab in the bed of my truck, parked anywhere.  We talked for hours while we stared at the stars; and everything was okay with the world.  We drove down country roads with all the windows down and the stereo as loud as it would go, wearing secondhand sunglasses and drinking Jones Soda, only stopping to climb grass covered hills buried deep in the emptiness of abandoned fields, hidden away from suburbia by mere miles.  Those were the days. We ate Chinese food out of the box, then finished off our meals with peanut butter M&Ms.  We watched the same movie five times in a row, laughing hysterically at all the jokes.  And we talked about the future, what it would be like and what we would be like.

We talked about fame and fortune, happy endings and the unknown.  They were always pipe-dream discussions, but we didn’t care.  We believed anything could happen if we believed hard enough; not letting anything, especially details, get us down.  The world was ours and it always would be, because we were working for it.  There were days when we cried, tears falling like rain from an April sky in Nebraska. And there were other days when we turned our backs and didn’t talk, completely disregarding each other as we tried to pull ourselves together on our own.  Sometimes we got mad, and we took it out on each other.  We drove each other home in cars only filled with the heavy beat of whatever we were listening to at the time, words kept inside with our souls, stewing.  Then we would call each other and apologize for whatever wrong we’d done.  

We drove for hours, flipping a coin to decide which direction we would go.  We got lost on many occasions, laughing the whole way back to our little corner of the world, dancing as much as two people strapped into a car by seat belts can. We went through the best and the worst, the happy and the sad, the angry and the depressed, and a number of other emotions that we met along the way.  That’s the way it was, but now that’s in the past. Things are different now, more complicated.  In so many ways we’re so different than we were, yet in so many ways we’re exactly the same.