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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change/Uncategorized

Ginger, Interrupted – Day 43

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Prompt – Something about your appearance you struggled with.

I hated my red hair as a kid. My parents always framed it like it was a blessing, as though it was some strange cosmic DNA secret upgrade that unlocked every fourth generation. They said it was rare. They said it made me memorable. They said it like I was chosen; however, I felt as though I was exposed because kids never called it rare. Kids could see my flaming red hair and used it as target practice.

Carrot Top. Big Red. Fire starter. Every nickname made sure I knew I was different. Houses changed often in the military with new classrooms and new people, but the insults never were new because the hair stayed the same. Somehow those that slung the insults thought they were original poets that uttered the insult at me first. Not the brightest bulbs in the pack, but still difficult to ignore.

Like most gingers, my skin sure as hell did not help matters. I was pale in a way that felt almost unfinished, like I had been sketched and colored in by the white Crayola crayon. Twenty-four seconds in the sun turned me into a walking warning label for future skin cancer prevention. Freckles multiplied overnight and merged together like some ancient protection rune drawn across my face and shoulders. Adults called them cute angel kisses. I called them evidence that a host of angels took a shit all over me.

There were moments I tried to negotiate with my red hair and fair skin. They always won. So I found myself standing just out of reach of direct sunlight. I watched other kids tan into some version of confidence that felt foreign to me. I was either white or lobster, a permanent contrast against whatever landscape I happened to live in that season. I wanted invisibility more than anything. I wanted to look like everyone else long enough to walk through a hallway without hearing insults.

Time did what time does. It softened some edges, sharpened others, and still others faded. Somewhere between leaving childhood and stepping into adulthood, the hair I tried to outrun began to feel less like a spotlight and more like a marker as it faded into auburn. It carried the memory of “carrot top” with it, but it turned out to be a good color. The freckles stopped feeling like a flaw and started to feel like a map of where I had been.

I still catch my reflection sometimes and see the kid who wished for darker hair, darker skin, anything that might let him disappear into the background noise of a hallway. He thought blending in would make him safe. He thought invisibility meant peace. What he did not know was that standing out would one day become a quiet kind of permission. The thing that made me feel exposed also trained my eyes to notice the other kid carrying something visible they never asked for. Different hair. Different language. Different body. Same feeling.

The red faded into auburn over time, softer at the edges, less fire and more ember. The freckles stopped feeling like a flaw and started to feel like coordinates, small constellations mapping where I had been rather than where I failed to belong. I stopped negotiating with the mirror. I stopped trying to outrun a color that had already outrun me.

I hated my red hair for years. Now it feels less like an accident and more like handwriting. Not a super power. Not a curse. Just a mark that stayed when everything else kept moving. And maybe that is what growing up really is. Learning that the parts of me I tried hardest to erase were never asking to be loved loudly. They were only asking to be allowed to stay.

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 5 - Body, Identity, and Change

Under the Square Light – Day 42

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Prompt: The First Time I Became Aware of My Body

I was young, maybe three years old. Dates blur as much as addresses when life moves from base to base, so I cannot swear to the age. We had just moved again. New walls with new sounds. New shadows stretching across a room that did not yet belong. I woke in the middle of the night needing to take a leak. I do not remember the urgency itself, only the pattern; as a child, every trip to the bathroom felt like an emergency because children wait until the last possible moment.

I remember standing on cold, ugly linoleum and flipping the light switch on. The bathroom filled with that sudden brightness from the generic square fixture that lived in every room of base housing…wide, practical, square glass that never changed unlike the people in the house. I saw only the top of my head at first. Then I adjusted, lifted myself higher on the step stool, and there I was. A body. A somebody?

I talked to myself. Not in full sentences, just sounds and small words. I moved my mouth and my arms and watched them both follow my instructions. I turned sideways. I leaned closer to the mirror from the step stool. I remember feeling both surprised and completely certain at the same time. That was me. I could talk. I could move. I could do things. The awareness had nothing to do with my looks. It was about my agency. I was something inside this shape I was seeing in the mirror that obeyed me.  It felt like discovering a toy I had always owned but had never played with until now.

Years later, a different type of body awareness arrived, and it was nothing like that first quiet moment in the mirror. The awareness did not come from me. It came from others. From glances that lingered too long. From jokes that sounded like laughter but felt like measurement. My body became something public before I understood it privately. I learned what I looked like through other people’s reactions long before I learned what I felt like inside my own skin.

At three, the mirror gave me independence with possibility. It was movement and voice in a body that could carry whatever story I wanted to tell. Later, the world handed me a different mirror. One that reduced me to my weight and size. One that suggested my body was something to manage, something to correct, something to explain. Both moments were awakenings.

What I know now, years later, is that neither version was the whole truth. The child in the bathroom mirror was right. The body was never a problem to solve. It was a place to live. A place to feel safe enough to grow, even when growth looked messy or uncomfortable or misunderstood.

Sometimes I think back to that kid standing in the bathroom, talking to himself like he had discovered a secret language. He did not yet know about weight or judgment or how easily a body becomes a story other people try to write for you. He only knew that he was there, awake inside his own reflection, testing what it meant to exist.

And maybe that is the first real awareness. Not the shape of the body, but the quiet recognition that someone is living inside it, watching, learning, waiting to decide which stories belong and which ones can be set down.

The mirror did not give me answers that night. It only gave me a beginning. And beginnings, I am learning, are often small, incandescent, and easy to miss until years later when the light finally makes sense.

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Left at the Base Gate – Day 41

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Prompt – What friendship meant then versus now.

Friendship for a Gen X military brat was never abstract. It was immediate, physical, and temporary. It lived on a base for a season. It was whoever arrived where I landed and stayed until the orders changed things. Closeness did not require history because the history was already baked into the coming and going. It required only shared space and a shared understanding that the now mattered.

Moves arrived without negotiation. One day there were no boxes, and the next day there were boxes. No one framed it as loss. It was logistics. Adults talked about duty and opportunity while kids learned how to say goodbye without ceremony. Grief did not get named or recognized, so it learned how to hide. It was hella efficient.

That efficiency shaped all parts of life including friendship. I learned how to read people and rooms quickly. I learned which parts of myself to lead with and which parts to keep packed. I learned how to belong without attaching too deeply because attachment always came with a cost that would be collected later. Leaving did not mean the friendship was not real. It only meant it had run its course.

There was a raw honesty in those friendships. There was no time for slow reveals or performative closeness. We went deep because the clock was already ticking. Loyalty was not measured in years. It was measured in moments by who stood next to me right then, and who kept my secrets when it mattered.

Years later, Japan reinforced that lesson in a quieter way. Friendship there came with an expiration date written directly into the contract. One year, sometimes two. The system itself discouraged permanence, as if rotation could prevent attachment from taking root. It felt almost sacred, like impermanence was a value worth protecting. I understood the rule. I broke it anyway.

In Japan, friendship was full and immediate. We did life together knowing it would end. There was no pretending otherwise. That honesty made the closeness sharper. We shared meals, mistakes, and small triumphs without the illusion of forever. When the goodbyes came, they were clean, even when they hurt like hell. The ending did not erase what had been real. Then time moved on, and the rules of friendship shifted again.

Adult friendship now is persistent and networked. It lives in texts, threads, and long digital echoes. Distance no longer explains disappearance. Silence gets interpreted. Absence becomes personal. Continuity is expected, even when life makes that continuity hard.

For someone raised where friendship ended cleanly at the base gate, this can feel disorienting. The instinct to give space can read as withdrawal. The habit of packing light can look like detachment. What once kept me steady can now feel out of step. And yet, something endures.

That upbringing left behind a particular strength. The ability to go deep without guarantees. The capacity to choose people deliberately rather than by convenience. A sensitivity to character, to kindness, to how someone treats power and vulnerability. There are fewer friendships now, perhaps, but the ones that remain carry real weight.

There is also a fluency in difference. I learned how to translate myself across places, cultures, and expectations. I learned that belonging is not automatic, but it is possible. That skill does not disappear. It matures. What can look like guardedness is often discernment. What can look like distance is often respect for the truth that closeness should be intentional. Friendship was never something I assumed would last forever. It was something I honored while it was true.

And maybe that is the quiet gift. Knowing that connection does not require permanence to be real. Knowing that love can be fierce and temporary and still shape a life. Knowing that when I choose to stay now, it is not because I have to. It is because I mean it.

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Civilian Rules – Day 40

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Prompt: A time a friend betrayed you

As a child, I was raised inside a system that offered basic training on how to exist with people that have an expiration date. Military bases were full of kids like me, changing addresses like refugees with pink slips. We learned how to attach quickly and detach cleanly. Friendships were intense, immediate, and understood to be temporary. When orders came, and they always came, we did not fight the ending. We practiced kindness in the present and disappearance in the future. It was not cruelty. It was survival. We handled each other gently because most of us already knew what heavy felt like at home.

I was hurt by friends during those years, but the hurt was diffused and governed by an agreed-upon set of rules. It belonged to circumstance more than intention. No one was really betraying anyone. We were all obeying the same unwritten code. Stay light, do not burden each other, and leave cleanly. This code failed me the first year my family became civilian.

Lawton, Oklahoma broke something open that I did not yet have language or experience for. My father could not find work. My mother worked in another state. Home still felt temporary, but without the structure that once explained why everything was temporary. At MacArthur High School, the rules I knew did not apply. Belonging was transactional and visibility was dangerous.

I was bullied for opting out of football, for choosing books and observation instead of collision. That alone would have been survivable. What I was not prepared for was betrayal disguised as friendship.

Tracy was my first real civilian friend. She listened. She asked questions. She made space for the softer parts of me that had never needed armor before. I trusted her because trust had always been safe inside temporary worlds. I told her my fears. I told her my uncertainties. I told her where I felt small.

She took those truths and passed them along to the very people I spoke about. She did not confront me. She did not warn me. She turned my vulnerability into currency. When the laughter came back to me secondhand, something inside me collapsed. This was not the clean ending I had been trained for. This was exposure. This was humiliation. This was betrayal with witnesses.

For a long time, I believed the lesson was that openness was a mistake. I learned how to seal myself. I learned how to withhold. Betrayal does not only break trust in another person. It fractures trust in the self who chose to believe. I was not only angry at Tracy. I was ashamed of my own hope.

It took years to understand that what happened in Lawton was not proof that I was naïve or weak. It was proof that I had crossed from a world governed by impermanence into one governed by performance. The hope arrived later, quietly. I did not lose my capacity to trust. I learned how to place it with care. I still believe in connection. I just no longer hand it over to civilians.

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Decimal Down in Front – Day 39

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Prompt – A time you betrayed or hurt a friend.

I went off to Oklahoma Christian University in the fall of 1992. At the time, I did not yet know how to name what I was running from, only that leaving felt necessary, even to a shitstorm like OC. My first year unraveled quickly. I drank too much, stayed numb on purpose, and called that suspension “figuring things out.” When the year ended, my GPA arrived like a small, undeniable truth…a decimal lead the way, as if even the numbers were hesitant to claim me other than the zero.

So, I went home for the summer and worked at Pepsi, driving a forklift.  They were long days that left my body tired and my thoughts loose. My house felt quieter than I remembered, as though something had already begun to close. I did not linger there. Most nights, I met old high school friends after work. We went to Applebee’s because no one questioned our age. We drank and talked and tried to decide who we were becoming by comparing ourselves to who we had already been.

Steve appeared in those quiet spaces at my house, a friend from before I had figured out how to be me. Back when I still rode the bus to school! Steve had learning disabilities and parents who seemed permanently absent in all the ways that count. He was kind, earnest, and always a little behind the moment, though never behind in heart. When he asked what I was doing, I told him about college in Oklahoma, about going back in the fall, and about my plans to figure things out.

Later that summer, he told me he had applied to Oklahoma Christian University and had been accepted. He said it with a kind of hopeful certainty, as though being near to my opportunity might offer him a door of his own. I remember feeling surprised, then unsettled, then quietly embarrassed by that reaction. I told myself a story about standards and readiness and merit, though what I was really protecting was distance.

When fall came, we were on the same campus. Steve arrived unprepared for the weight of it. The rules, the expectations, the rituals of belief that asked for performance more than understanding. Chapel, bible classes, the careful obedience that hung in the air all about. I recognized his confusion because it mirrored my own when I first arrived. I understood his shock because I had already absorbed it once. And still, I stepped back.

I told myself I was busy. I told myself he needed to figure things out on his own. I told myself I was trying to survive. All of those things were partly true. None of them were generous. I spoke to him when we crossed paths. I was kind enough to avoid guilt. But I did not offer help. I did not walk beside him. I did not lend him language when he had none.

The truth is simpler and hell of a lot more harsh. Steve reminded me of who I had been. Staying close to him felt like risking my fragile reinvention. So I chose distance. I chose silence. I chose myself. That is how I betrayed him. Not with cruelty, but with absence.

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Cheese Metal Belonging – Day 38

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Prompt – Inside jokes that felt like belonging.

Chris and I played baseball on the base league at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. He went to a private Catholic school in town, and sports leagues on base were one of the only organized ways we were able to spend time together outside of our South Side Trails adventures. When one of our baseball seasons ended, we decided to extend that sense of belonging and proximity into a new sport. Soccer. Oh Jesus. Soccer meant crossing over the tracks to the old base, where most of the officers’ kids lived because they made up the majority of the soccer teams.

Chris and I crossed over to the old side of base and brought our inside jokes with us as a talisman. They were not especially clever, and they were certainly not kind. They were observational. They were earned. We joked about the officers’ kids we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by. We joked about how they wore Umbro soccer shorts and we called them “UmmmBros”. We told jokes about how they listened to U2 as we listened to glam rock cheese metal, and how they carried themselves like they were already officers themselves. We called them snobs, but the joke was less about them and more about us. It was about noticing patterns and naming them together.

We were enlisted kids. That mattered. Officers’ kids lived on a different side of the base, quite literally and indeed metaphorically. They had better lawns, better clothes, better toys, better posture, and what appeared to be better confidence. At least that was how it looked from where we stood.

The jokes worked because we both saw what we were joking about. We were not inventing the distinction. We were recognizing it. Every time one of us made a crack about the “UmmmBros” or U2’s latest album, it was not really about taste in music, sports, or clothes. It was a shorthand. A nod. A way of saying, I see what you see. I live where you live.

That is what inside jokes do. They compress shared experience into something small enough to carry in a sentence. They let two people signal belonging without having to explain themselves with no footnotes or justification. It is just recognition. We needed that on our side of the base.

Those jokes were not inclusive. That was the point. They carved out a small, protected space where we did not have to translate ourselves. In a life built on impermanence and rank, that mattered more than I understood at the time. We were not laughing to exclude others. We were laughing to anchor ourselves.

I think now about how much of my childhood was spent learning which version of myself would be safest in which room. Inside jokes short-circuited that work. With Chris, I did not have to perform. I did not have to prove anything. The joke itself was the proof. If it landed, I belonged.

Years later, I understand that belonging does not require permanence. It requires recognition. It requires someone else noticing the same absurdities and letting you laugh about them without explanation. That kind of belonging is fragile, but it is real. It lives in memory. It survives distance.

I do not remember every joke. I remember the feeling of them…the ease, and relief. The sense that, for a moment, I was not alone in my noticing.

And maybe that is the quiet truth. Belonging does not always announce itself. Sometimes it shows up as laughter that would not make sense to anyone else. Sometimes it sounds like a joke about “UmmmBros” and “U2, but not you”. Sometimes it is simply the moment you realize someone else is standing beside you, seeing the same thing, and choosing to laugh instead of explain.

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Borrowed Fire- Day 37

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Prompt – A friend who pulled you toward trouble.

I have never had a true friend who pulled me toward trouble, but I did have a lot of trouble that pulled me toward people I called friends. In Plattsburgh, there was a kid who was more of a friend of a friend, or a friend of the group, a kid that drifted in and out of our orbit when he wanted. His name was Mike. He was short, quick to anger, and always looking for an edge to push. His dad was frequently gone on temporary assignments, and I never knew what his father’s job actually was. I only knew his absence hung in the air and created a lot of strain for Mike.

Mike’s height may have been part of his meanness, but the larger truth was that he lived inside a story that felt humiliating and painfully public. Even at thirteen, my group of friends knew what was happening at his house. Mike’s mother was finding her physical needs elsewhere when her husband was gone, and the worst part was not only that we knew, but that Mike knew we knew. That kind of knowledge does not sit quietly in a kid’s body. It turns into heat and rage. It turns into dare after dare. It turns into a need to control the narrative by burning it all down first.

Mike taught us all how to smoke. He taught us how to drink. We objectified women in magazines together in the South Side Trails. We were mean together. We keyed cars, put sugar in gas tanks, made prank calls, snuck into movies on base, shoplifted, and treated other people’s property like it was a joke we deserved to tell. When Mike was around, the meanness had a sharpness to it, like we were proving something. When he was not around, some of the same dumb choices still happened, but the cruelty did not have the same appetite. Mike did not just bring trouble with him. He brought a mood. He made all of us meaner than we were on our own.

The father situation was Mike’s issue, but it was also part of the wider tone on base. Plenty of fathers carried their own damage, and plenty of homes ran on alcohol, abuse, pornography, and the kind of quiet debauchery that never stayed as quiet as adults thought it did. Mike’s particular version of it was personal and specific. He believed someone else’s father was sleeping with his mother, and he believed everyone knew, and he lived inside that humiliation like it was a locked room he could not escape. So he pulled us down with him, and we went because we were young and because we were bored. We did not understand the difference between loyalty and participation. We were far too young to know how to pull someone up, and we were not yet brave enough to refuse the gravity.

Years later, I can see the shape of it more clearly. Trouble was never the point. Trouble was the language. Mike was trying to say, I am hurting, and I cannot stand being the only one who has to carry it. That does not excuse what we did, and it does not clean it up into something noble, but it does make the story more human.

What I hold now is this. I cannot go back and un-key the cars or un-make the cruelty, but I can tell the truth about how it happened. I can name the moment trouble stopped being thrilling and started being a warning. I can also be grateful that something in me eventually reached for a different kind of friend. Hope, I have learned, is not the denial of what I did or did not do. Hope is the decision to grow past it, and to recognize that pulling someone up sometimes starts with stepping out of the dark first.

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out – Day 36

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Prompt – ​​A friend who helped you see yourself more clearly.

Lots of firsts happen in high school. Some turn into great stories, while others stay quiet and make a person better without fanfare at all. Carol was one of those quiet firsts for me. She was a minor character in my storyline, but she helped me see myself more clearly and understand that I was a process inside a process.

We found each other in Ms. Peregrine’s art class, and then we kept finding each other outside of it. We went to coffee shops and talked the way early 90s kids talked when we thought the world might be ending and might also be remade in the same week. Our conversations had that grunge, almost avant garde seriousness that made everything feel both ridiculous and sacred. Music was always part of it because music was how we translated ourselves back then. The Smiths, The Psychedelic Furs, Nirvana, it all gave us language when we did not have enough of our own.

Carol drove an old Saab, and we would head out to Derry, New Hampshire, to a small coffee shop where time slowed down. For a while, life really did seem simple: coffee, cigarettes in the cold air outside, art talk, future talk, and the illusion that we could choose our next chapter without the past reaching up to claim us.

Right before graduation, we went for coffee the way we usually did, and I told her about the next move, the one that was supposed to mean freedom. College. It was another fresh start with another address, but this one would be mine. It was still another version of me being packed up and carried forward, but it was going to be away from them. Carol listened, then reached down and handed me a gift. It was a vase she had made.

It still sits in my house. Like me, it is not smooth. It is textured, marked by the touch of others, and it does not pretend to be untouched. Its surface is made of rings, each one visible, each one earned. I can see where the clay was pressed thinner, where it was pulled upward, where it almost failed and did not. The shape narrows, widens, and narrows again, and nothing about it feels accidental. It looks like a thing that has been worked. It looks like a thing that has been tested. It looks honest.

When Carol handed it to me, she did not talk about the beauty of the object. She talked about the process. She told me that each move, each experience, each hurt, each whatever, reduces us. The wheel pulls the clay down even as it spins it forward. Loss compresses and change thins because living costs something. But then, she said, another hand builds us back up. Another layer with another pass, and another choice. She spoke like she was offering a map, and I remember realizing she was not just talking about clay. She was talking about me, and she was doing it in a way that did not feel like pity. It felt like recognition.

What stays with me is the part that sounded almost too simple to be true. The height is not predetermined. The clay does not decide that. The wheel does not decide that. The hands do. I do.

That sentence landed in a place in me that had always assumed the opposite. I had lived as if the moves and endings and misunderstandings were the authors, as if the next chapter was always something that happened to me rather than something I shaped. I had learned how to adapt, how to read rooms, how to disappear when necessary, and how to be grateful for whatever remained. I had not learned how to claim the idea that I could still choose. Not in the shiny motivational way, but in the real way, the slow way, the hands on the wheel way.

Experience is experience. It is not good or bad in the clean moral categories people love to use to make life feel organized. It is formative. It shapes. The vase does not judge the pressure that made it narrower. It holds it. It carries it forward. The narrow places make the wider ones possible. The evidence of strain becomes part of the strength, not an argument against it.

Carol helped me see myself more clearly. She gave me an image that could hold complexity without turning it into judgment. She handed me a physical reminder that being shaped is not the same thing as being broken.

The vase sits there, quiet and unimpressed, holding its own history without apology. It reminds me that I can honor what shaped me without letting it name my limits. The clay remembers everything. And still, it holds.

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Terms and Conditions – Day 35

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Prompt – A falling-out that still sting.

Friends come and go. That has always been the deal. It was the quiet contract of the military, the rotating cast of names and addresses that followed me from place to place. College became the same kind of temporary, only dressed up in credit hours, retention rates, and being “mature” about it all. People arrived, people disappeared, and then people became a story told in passing.

After graduation, shortly following a quick stint as an accountant, Kari and I moved to Japan for a teaching job that came with a built-in expiration date. The contracts were one year, which allowed for a tidy little ending. The Japanese school system also had a way of enforcing impermanence. Teachers were moved around periodically, as though the goal was to prevent deep bonds from forming. It felt almost religious, like attachment itself was a rule that was not supposed to be broken. I broke it anyway.

In Japan, I was an expat with a small group of young, inexperienced teachers. We were all hungry for belonging, and we were far enough from home that the hunger got louder. We did life together in full. We carried the hard parts and the easy parts, and we laughed at the absurd parts that only make sense when daily life is built in a language that still feels borrowed. We became tight, not in a casual way, but in the way people do when they become each other’s lifeline in a foreign country.

It was beautiful. It was real. It was the kind of closeness that made ordinary days feel like a story worth keeping.

When we returned home, we tried to bring the bond with us. We talked about forming a team of four couples to go back to work as missionaries – whatever the fuck that meant! We met a few times to dream and map out a future that felt like a second chance at that Japan closeness. I let myself believe it could happen. I let myself imagine a circle that would hold.

There was a lunch get-together. Kari and I were not invited. Later, someone lied about it with the kind of polite, church-friendly dishonesty that is supposed to keep the peace while it quietly kills the truth. Eventually, one person came clean, and in that moment I remembered why I used to prefer transient relationships.

I had broken the rules. I had allowed myself to get close. I had allowed myself to love people, not as passing characters, but as anchors. I had trusted the story. I had trusted the holy language people use when they want to make ordinary friendship feel sanctioned and permanent.

Love hurts when it ends. This one stung because it was real. It was tied to some of the most beautiful years of my life, and it was wrapped in religion like a ribbon that also functioned as a blindfold. The pain was not the lunch. The pain was the realization that the bond had terms and conditions, and I had not been told what they were until I failed them. Even now, the sting still registers because the years were real. Japan was real. The laughter was real. The belonging was real. A single lunch betrayal cannot erase that, even if it tried.

Some friendships are seasonal. Some are sacred. Some are both, right up until they are not. I can grieve what ended without pretending it never mattered. I can hold the good years in one hand and the betrayal in the other and finally stop forcing them to cancel each other out.

February 2026
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365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 4 - Friendship and First Tribes

Detours and Dead Letters – Day 34

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Prompt – How the Friendship Changed

This is part three of a three prompt series. The first post is here and the second post is here.

Jeremy and I did not explode. There was no betrayal, no raised voices, no dramatic final scene with the kind of closure often found in movies with an amazing music and video montage. The friendship changed the way military friendships usually change. One day, the routine is intact. The next day, a family is loading boxes, a moving truck is idling, and the neighborhood has a new vacancy. One day we were hanging out during recess. The next day, he was going back to Texas.

In my mind, it felt like leaving. For Jeremy, it was a homecoming. He acted like the universe was correcting a mistake. He was a Texan through and through. He loved the heat and was ready to say goodbye to the winters. Alaska was, at best, an interruption for him…a detour. Texas was a return. I understood that much, even at that age. Still, understanding did not make his leaving hurt less.

We both said the things kids say when adults are listening. We promised to keep in touch. We said we would write. We said we would call when we could. And of course, we said we would not forget. Those sentiments were offered like bandages, thin and polite, as if language could seal up the gaping wound not even fully realized yet.

I upheld my part of the promise, writing him every week. Jeremy did not. I remember the ritual of writing him more than what I wrote him. I used the same pad of paper every time. I tried to make our ordinary days sound interesting, worth staying connected to. I narrated the small things because small things were what connected us. I wrote about a new snow fort, “our” new teacher, and the new kid who moved into his old house. I folded the letter carefully, far too small, slid it into the envelope, wrote his address, and then I waited.

He never responded. Not one time. At first, I worked hard to excuse his silence. I invented reasons for the friendship to remain intact, even if only on my side of the map. Maybe the mail got lost. Maybe his mother forgot to buy stamps. Maybe he wrote back and it disappeared into some military black hole where all the missing things go. I was loyal, and I was young enough to believe that if I kept showing up, the world would meet me halfway.

Then, slowly, I realized a letter was not coming. I was writing to myself. I was crushed for a long time, and I never talked about it. It did not look like grief adults would recognize. It looked like me becoming even more careful and small.

I did not make another best friend until two moves later, at Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Between Jeremy and Plattsburgh, I learned a lesson that felt less like wisdom and more like a bruise that never healed.

People say they will write. People say they will call. People say whatever they need to say in the last hour before goodbye because the truth is too sharp to hold in your mouth. When people are not close to one another anymore, even if they once were, shit changes. Distance does not just stretch a friendship. It edits it. It removes the ordinary moments that keep love warm and alive. It replaces them with intention, and intention is harder to sustain than people admit because it requires work.

Looking back, I can see something tender under the damage. I kept writing because connection mattered to me. I believed in continuity, even when my life trained me in detours. That belief did not save the friendship, but it revealed something about me. I was the kind of kid who tried to build a bridge. I was the kind of kid who stayed, even when someone else did not.

And maybe that is the quiet hope inside the story. The friendship changed, and it hurt. It left a mark. But it also showed me, early, that I was capable of devotion, of showing up, of loving in a way that was not performative. The loss taught me caution, yes. But the writing taught me something else too. It taught me that my instinct, even then, was to reach out, to connect, to make meaning, so I could stay human in a life designed around leaving.

February 2026
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