This post is for a very select few who I will always associate these fond memories with. Although this is a very specific article, I know that everyone, not just the ones I shared a table with, can find some sort of deep, joyful, connection.
Friday nights, nothing really gets any better than that. A big win at the basketball game starts the night off on the right foot. Afterward, it's a small caravan of our cars toward the local Culver's for some victory food. It's every Friday, every time we have the best of times, and it's tradition.
Tonight has been most likely one of the very last times that our small group will stockpile our order numbers on one big table in the back, one of the last times we'll try to steal each other's cheese curds, one of the last times we'll disrupt everyone else at the restaurant trying to enjoy their food. While we all laughed and ate, I realized these times were fleeting from us so quickly. Before we know it, it'll be caps and gowns and diplomas and college move-in days, and high school will be in the rearview. Everyone said it would go by so fast, and they were right. I took in every moment I could gather up into my memories, I will never forget the nights I've spent with some of the best people, sitting in a blue booth, laughing so hard that we cried.
It's almost cruel isn't it? To love every single part of life and all the people apart of it, and then to have to change in a few months? Of course not, it's how life works. It's all in what we do during the right now. Sure, we could have just gone home every Friday night because "It's pointless to make memories with each other if we're just going to be moving on soon." But we don't do that. We live for the now. We live to find as much happiness we can every single day, not looking toward the future or where we will be in 'X' amount of time, but how happy we are now. We grasp at the happiness of today so that tomorrow we can look back on those memories as we held them so close when they came.
I know for a fact, that one blue booth in the back corner of Culver's will always make me smile. The memories I made tonight and every other Friday night there are engraved on my heart and I'll think about those for the rest of my life. I hope that the people who I spent those nights with appreciate the memories just as much as I do, and that whenever they may see a blue booth in a back corner of a restaurant, they think of their high school memories and their friends. No matter how far apart I may get from you guys, our memories are always with me, and they'll never go away.
