Tag: belonging

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

Unfinished, Yet Worthy – Day 51

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Prompt – Who You Thought You Were Becoming

Reading through old college papers this past weekend felt like opening a time capsule written by someone who believed becoming was a destination instead of a motion. Every paper held a version of me trying to decide who deserved to exist long enough to grow. The theme was always the same regardless of the assignment. The theme was simply becoming. I wanted the chance to stay somewhere long enough for roots to allow something to grow.

Growing up between bases meant growth was temporary and stunted. I learned to adapt faster and grow shallow rather than deep. Peace at all costs became the unspoken rule, which meant parts of me stayed small so the room could stay quiet. I tried on identities the way other kids tried on jackets. Some fit for a season. Some fit well enough to almost feel true. But none stayed long enough to mature into anything stable.

What I wanted most was not a specific identity. I wanted permission to become something recognizable. I believed everyone else had already arrived somewhere solid while I kept circling the runway waiting for clearance to land. I thought if I chose the right role, did the right thing, performed the right version of myself, then maybe love would return, conversations would reopen, and I would finally be seen as someone worth staying for. The moment never came, at least it was not a moment.

Becoming did not announce itself with applause or resolution. It stretched across years instead. It took me across oceans to Japan where silence felt honest for the first time. It carried me into Rwanda where history sat heavy in the air and made my own questions feel smaller and sharper at the same time. It placed me at tables with presidents where power felt strangely human, almost fragile. It sat me in pubs glowing with warm wood and laughter where friendship felt less like performance and more like breath. It led me into churches that promised healing yet left echoes of harm that took years to untangle.

I still have not crossed a finish line; rather, I am content with standing in the space where old versions of me linger while new ones are still learning how to breathe. Past and present speak at the same time, asking different questions with the same voice. Clarity never arrived the way I expected; instead, I know becoming is not a destination. The person I thought I was becoming dissolved somewhere along the way of me actually becoming him. What remains is not fixed, but rather a life being lived. I am less interested now in arriving and more willing to stand in the in between, where memory, grief, and possibility sit side by side and refuse to resolve into anything simple. And for the first time, my worth is mine. It is no longer measured by who stayed or who left; it is measured by the simple fact that I am still here, still becoming, and no longer apologizing for taking up space.

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

Transactional Reflections – Day 47

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Prompt – The Mirror Years

Mirrors. Another world reflected back, distorted in ways that felt both familiar and foreign. I was never obsessed with the mirror during the mirror years because the distortion was too great to trust. The mirror did not lie exactly, but it never told the whole truth either. It caught my outline but fully missed my context. It held my image still while everything inside me kept shifting.

It is not that I did not care about what I looked like. I cared deeply. I already knew what I looked like because others made sure to tell me. Classmates narrated my appearance while adults tried to soften it with other words, and like the mirror, neither kids nor adults told the whole story.

During those years, I learned to approach the mirror like my family approached houses; transactional in nature. A quick glance to adjust my shirt and then move on. Staying too long invited comparison, and comparison always felt rigged from the start. Red hair, pale skin, and a spare tire around my waist was a hard hand to win with. I stood there sometimes wondering if the person looking back was fixed or temporary, just like the house I lived in for that year.

I guess there was a strange relief in not being obsessed because obsession requires belief. I did not fully believe in the real me or the reflection. However, there were still moments when I lingered longer than planned. Not to admire or to criticize, but to study my real smile versus the one I performed to keep the peace. Those moments felt like secret conversations that no one else could interrupt. The mirror was less about appearance and more about listening.

Of course, the mirror did not give answers and as I mentioned, it was never really about how I looked. It became a quiet witness instead. I learned that my reflection was not asking to be corrected. It was asking to be seen without the noise of everyone else’s language layered on top of it. Through the distortion and my doubt, if I stood there long enough to feel the weight of my own presence, something steadier began to surface. Not confidence. Not certainty. Just recognition.

Eventually I stopped asking the mirror to tell me anything at all. I stood there less often, and when I did, I looked without searching for meaning. The reflection remained incomplete, and maybe it always will be. What changed was not the image, but my willingness to leave it unfinished. I learned that understanding does not always arrive with resolution. Sometimes it arrives as a quiet acceptance that the person in the glass is only one version of the story, and that the rest of me exists somewhere just beyond its frame, moving forward even when the reflection stays behind.

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

A Different Brand of Baggage – Day 45

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Prompt – Learning what “cool” meant.

Cool, according to younger me, was all about visibility. As someone who had created an entire science and creed around being invisible, confidence and cool had everything to do with being perceived or seen as cool, with the key being seen. I was not cool, or so I thought at the time. I was the kid who followed the rules not just to follow them, but so others would leave me alone long enough for me to be by myself. Later, quietly and often in private, I bucked the system in smaller ways by reading, writing, and thinking – so cool, I know! Somewhere inside all of that, I was cool; however, I did not believe it then and neither did the crowd that measured such things.

As a military kid moving every time the base commander sneezed or shifted the wind, I watched cool from the sidelines before I ever tried to step into it. Each new school carried its own language, its own hierarchy, its own unwritten rules about who mattered and why. There were a few universals about sports and money, but every place crowned a different tribe, and the traits that defined them did not always match the last place. Still, that tribe always seemed untouchable. They walked into a room as though the room had been waiting for them all along. I walked in hoping to pass unnoticed. Red hair, my weight, and my own doubts made invisibility nearly impossible, so I studied cool long before I allowed myself to imagine becoming it.

At first, I believed cool meant rebellion and risk. The kid who talked back. The group that laughed too loudly in the cafeteria. They looked fearless, and fearlessness felt like the opposite of everything I carried. I stayed small, stayed agreeable, stayed quiet enough to avoid friction. Inside, though, something restless kept pressing forward. Every time I watched someone question an adult or challenge a rule that did not make sense, I felt admiration tangled with envy. They looked free, even though many of them were simply bound to a different kind of baggage.

It took years to understand that what I had been seeing was not freedom; it was performance. And sometimes it was armor. The loudest rebellion rarely held the deepest courage. I began to notice “real cool” in quieter acts. The student who asked a thoughtful question when everyone else stayed silent. The friend who told the truth even when it complicated things. The teacher who admitted uncertainty and invited the class into the work of figuring it out together. Those moments did not look cinematic or dramatic, yet they felt grounded in something honest…something cool.

Cool stopped being about defiance and became more about authenticity. It became the willingness to show up fully, even when that meant standing alone for a moment. The people I came to respect as cool were not trying to be different; they were simply refusing to disappear because of their difference.

Looking back, I see that my definition of cool was always tangled up with belonging. I thought cool meant breaking rules because I believed that was the only way to be noticed. What I know now is quieter and more complicated. Cool is not the volume of rebellion; it is the clarity of self. It is the slow decision to speak when silence would be easier. It is the courage to ask questions, not to disrupt for attention, but to understand more deeply.

Somewhere along the way, watching from the edges, I began to ask my own questions. Not loudly. Not in ways that made a scene. Just enough to feel the ground shift under my own feet. Cool stopped looking like rebellion and started feeling like recognition. The loudest people in the room were not always the freest; many of them were just better at hiding their fear in plain sight. What I had once called invisible was never absence. It was observation. It was patience. It was a boy learning how to belong to himself before belonging to any crowd. And maybe that is what cool finally became; not a performance to be witnessed, but a quiet agreement between who I was and who I no longer needed to pretend to be.

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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 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.

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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

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

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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