Independence Day
I didn't know any of it yet.
I open the coffee shop on the fourth for double pay. All of my coworkers said it wasn’t worth it, but that’s a lesson I would need to learn for myself. Someone told me to wear black pants because people get pissy when the heat comes; I end up glad I listened after a douche with a goatee tells me his latte “doesn’t look right” and slides it back over the counter with the same gusto I imagine Washington held as his paddles cut through the Delaware. I go home and shower, briefly, hand wash my pants and hang them up over the curtain rod. Sophia is dressed and ready already; I quickly pull on fresh starchy shorts and resign myself to the idea that I won’t be opening on the fourth ever again.
Sophia and I walk to the party, a house belonging to an undisclosed senior where someone is yelling for Christopher. Someone is always yelling for Christopher–”Christopher, where should I stick the extra ___?” “Christopher, the watermelon doesn’t taste like vodka, are you sure you put enough in?”
Does the house belong to Christopher? asks Sophia. I’m not entirely sure. The house is just a house, just a plot point. We later learn that it does not.
We find the watermelon with the piles of syringes and empty Tito’s next to it, try some and laugh. It tastes like watermelon, we both agree. An hour later, the party knows it has been adequately infused.
The overhead deck sways as everyone stands on it. I feel like I’m dancing, ethereal, moving through this in a way that only either a true beauty or a true pretender can; I identify myself as the latter, but nobody needs to know that. The girls from school who only remember to like me when we’re all drunk come up and start a conversation. Between their words, I glance around: the juniors, the seniors, the graduates. A neighbor comes to the yard and screams that we’re breaking the infrastructure and we all laugh. Somebody jumps—hard—attempting to make a point, and we can feel the wood shift under our feet.
A table spray painted with a lazy American flag; beer pong against two of our classmates. Christopher comes out and winks at me and I blush. I ask who his odds are on and he says “you guys.” Sophia and I keep a steady lead until the last two shots, but when the game is over we still stare at each other wide-eyed, not wanting to publicly mouth “I didn’t know we could do that that well.” We leave soon after. There’s really no way to top the performance that has already been given.
It is Sophia’s birthday weekend, an occasion for which I am glad there will be fireworks. I’ve attempted to follow a cupcake recipe, piping blue and green icing meticulously as I possibly can into swirls on top, hurriedly hide each one in the fridge before it droops. I purchase candles to smoke up the already overheating kitchen. We sit in the living room with the window open, watching the early evening parade go down Main Street and I photograph my brother’s boy scout troop from behind; they’ve traveled to be here in this semblance of a city. I text him good job after, and he says For what? For walking? He’s fifteen and he’s peeved over it, but I know that a few years ago he would have worn this event out in speech, told everyone he knew about his “semi-fame” on the fourth of July.
We’re thinking about the future. What’s coming? We’re independent, or at least technically we should feel it in our own place. I do the dishes, racing against the water’s boiling point. Sophia says tomorrow she’d like to get waffles, buy plants, sleep in. That order. She says we should bring hoodies to fireworks tonight because it’s chilly near the water. I took off work two weeks in advance, so I nod along—Yes, I will come tomorrow. Let me grab our stuff.
My phone chimes that the party is still going if we’d like to go back. I don’t answer. I scrub the same plate over and over until my hands blister and look at Sophia—really look at Sophia, at her eyes that I swear changed with the new job, glasses fogging with the windows, tugging on the short sleeve of her shirt. She looks the same as when we were eighteen, except entirely different. But that is all it ever has been, right? And that’s what there will be—parties with the people who seem to renew themselves yearly, hot kitchens, Radiohead-referenceable jobs.
I don’t know it yet, but barely two weeks later I will purchase the first round of the pills that will go on to steal the next year of my life, a secret I keep from Sophia many times over, always until it borders on too late. I don’t know it yet, but these pills will resculpt my body, which I will grow proud of, eat at my flesh and my liver and ultimately, my memory too. This weekend will become one of the only parts I recall of the summer. So what’s wrong with this picture? It feels like something must be, some upset should be occurring; for the things that happened after all of this, something certainly has to be awry. But I’ve looked at this weekend retrospectively as though I will be tested on it, and there’s nothing. Nothing that wasn’t there already. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t an addict before, or that I won’t be one after, or that I’m not one still. I can’t change my fate either way–whether I’ve simply forgotten how to or this future was inevitable.
But right now it’s Independence Day and I don’t know any of this yet. Sophia is twenty and I am twenty, too, and these months of overlap are special because there are only four each year. We have jobs we regard with naivete and nuance and an apartment with a funny shape, which we love. We sift what’s left of sweet, childlike friendship through our fingers like sand, subconsciously aware that neither of us will likely ever know it in this way again. Fireworks blaze overhead like the end of a movie, and I don’t know anything yet. Right now, this is it: we are here, together, on this same beach, free.
Absolutely Imperative Footnote
I know I posted the winter fragment dump within this very week; I have an urge to apologize, but I’m not going to. This is an essay I’ve played around with for a while and last night I got the urge to share it with a few people and they all really liked it so I thought maybe it was time to free her into the world. She’s one of the ones that makes me want to scream “IF YOU KNOW ME NO YOU DON’T” but I’m beginning to think that’s a positive indicator.
There is an elephant in the room right now, I know. I am ignoring it. That’s all I wanted to tell you, is that we’re ignoring the elephant. I was proud of this essay and I am proud of this essay and I felt like a hypocrite still working on it, so I present it with open arms.
Spring is here. Warm days are sandwiched between cold ones. There are birds on the overlook every morning when I wake up, so I know we’re all going to be okay.
Love you all.
xx- R
OH P.S. the photo is film I took of Sophia from the summer, in the aforementioned overheating kitchen! I thought it added a sweet touch :)
Slay!