I Wish People Could Just Read My Mind, Rather Than Try to Unscramble the Half-Message That Is All I Can Ever Manage to Say

It's both comforting and depressing to realize that the most profound theme, in a practical sense, that I have ever come across, is from the show Millionare Matchmaker.

What Patti Stanger says over and over (mostly to the girl millionares) is that early on, they focus on advancing their careers, and do not realize until their later 40s that they wanted marriage and children and a family. And by then it's often too late. Now, I'm not worried about that exact problem yet. (You probably have to actually go to college and get some sort of job before you get to actually care about career advancement.) But this message more generally ties into the banal aphorisms such as "carpe diem" and whatnot. Because time does fly if you do not look out.

Every year of high school, you and me and everyone else promised that the next year, we would have more time to hang out. Then, we would not be so busy, so just right now, let's just forsake each others' company, because we have things to do right now. And so we do homework, we get internships, we do extracurriculars, and wait for that someday. It's always the latter half of the school year, or the summer, or next year. Remember junior year? We bought into the general agreements that junior year is Hardest. And senior year is Freedom. But with colleges, college applications, college visits, college choosing, college orientation, and, as always, school, which doesn't get easier if you choose the right classes, and extracurriculars, which are unsympathetic to senioritis or the fact that in six months, we will be gone, Freedom is a lie.

And now it's summer, which should really be freedom, but it isn't, again. So where does that leave you and I? Where does that leave us all? Is this meant to make the goodbyes easier? A slow edging away and more distant meetings and plans, until the day we're scattered to the wind? So we aren't obligated and don't deign to try to reconnect, because soon it will be college, and the new goals, and grad school, and really, after all that, then we can hang out, if we make it?

As I sit here for hours on end, I wonder if any of you even see this. Or if you see it but you can find some justification for this, because I'm having trouble. And perhaps it is the better for you all to be rushing around and going away, and busy, all the more better for your lives and paths and futures. But I've been here, working on little things of my own, but still here, if you ever stop moving. So I see that the big bang has happened and we're sailing away, further and further away, and I wonder if I should try to stay here a little while more, hoping that you all have a moment of time to spare for the now, or if I should just go - say that I love you all and that sure, later we can call each other up and maybe meet for some drinks when we're done and well and established, but right now I'm just going to focus on getting there.

It's not as if it must be one or the other. I just wish everyone would just

slow

down.

Just a little.

Because here's a little something that people also say:

We won't ever ever be here (right here, in this moment of time with these people these resources these ideas and hopes and dreams) ever ever again.

And I really would like to see you all again before you're gone.