When I was growing up, I’d hear adults tell me to cherish my time in school, but I never really understood what that meant. As a kid surrounded by peers I’d known most of my life, it was hard to imagine things changing. I’d been with these people every day since first grade; we all lived within the same 20mile radius, and we were all friends.
Butyoudon’tknowwhat you’ve got till it’s gone, as they say. Now that I’ve seen friends graduate, pursue careers, get married and even have a couple kids of their own, the feeling that life as it used to be will not be the same anymore is finally hitting me as I graduate, too.
One of my favorite memories from those more carefree days came during my junior year of high school, when a couple friends and I took a trip to Lollapalooza in Chicago. They had arranged to meet up with a couple friends there, and I tagged along with extra cash I had saved from the car wash I’d worked at since I was 16. Shoutout to the formerAqua Express Car Wash on May Avenue. We piled into my 2004 Land Rover Discovery and hit the road.
Lollapalooza 2016 was one of the best festival lineups of the last decade, with heavy hitters such as Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, LCD Soundsystem, Flume, Lana Del Rey and more. We spent almost the entire 12-hour car ride talking about how excited we were, how we would get to the front of each show and how we would pull off the other necessary shenanigans to maximize our good time.
In a pleasant surprise, the place we were headed to meet their friends was Trump Tower. Do not take this as a political statement, but that place is really dang nice. At 17, that alone felt like proof we had crossed some invisible line into adulthood. We were Oklahoma kids walking into one of the nicest buildings I had ever seen, acting like we belonged there and trying not to look too amazed by everything around us. The city felt impossibly big, the weekend felt endless, and none of us had any real responsibilities beyond getting back home in one piece.
We went on the trip for themusic,butlookingback, I remember the moments in between more. I remember meetingupbetweenshows, killing time in the city and being packed into an old Land Rover with people I assumed would always be around. I never struggled to appreciate the moment, but at 17, the weekend just felt fun. Now, it feels like a version of life that was already beginning to disappear before I even knew it.
I don’t miss being 17, but I do miss how easy friendship felt when it didn’t require weeks of planning, working around jobs and figuring out who was free between weddings, trips and the rest of adult life. It was just built into the day. You saw your friends at school, after school, on weekends and sometimes for a four-day trip to a music festival in Chicago. If I pitched a Lollapalooza trip to my group chat full of working fathers today, they would literally think it was a joke. Such is life.
I am excited for what comes next, but I understand why we were always told to cherish it. They were not warning us that life would get worse, but that it would never be that simple again.