South Side Trails – Muddled Soma

365 Day Coming of Age Prompt Project/Theme 6 - First Crushes and First Heartbreaks

Orbiting April – Day 52

February 15, 2026February 16, 2026 ljandkari1 Comment

Prompt – Your Earliest Crush

April was her name. I was twelve. She was beautiful, or at least the memory of her is, softened by distance and the way time edits what it can no longer hold. Her father was a TSgt, and they lived a few houses down from us on Plattsburgh Air Force Base, close enough that it was easy to accidentally run into her when I wanted. Her mother looked like an older echo of April, same features but worn thinner, as if life had pressed its thumb into her for too long. Years of folding a life into cardboard boxes every eighteen months had settled into the lines of her face. Some military wives learned how to pack without leaving bruises behind. She never quite did.

April and I went to the same junior high school but did not have any of the same classes together. I had to see her around the neighborhood if I wanted to see her. I saw her at the bus stop. I saw her when I went to her house to collect payment for the newspaper that month. I saw her when I was walking to the South Side Trails to hang out with the boys. I saw her often; she never saw me.

My crush on April looked like an orbit. I circled her life quietly, measuring my day by the chance of passing through her gravity. I practiced conversations in my head that never left my mouth. I changed the speed of my bike when I thought she might be outside. I learned the dance of pretending not to care while caring so much it felt like a fifty pound secret I carried in my chest.

I do not remember a single real conversation between us. What I remember is the anticipation of a conversation, the sharp awareness of my own body whenever she was near, and the sudden self-awareness about my red hair, about weight, about how to stand or where to put my hands. But, alas, nothing. It was not like she was not cruel. She was simply living her own best twelve-year-old life, and I was learning the quiet math of a one way conversation.

My crush on April never really began or ended; it just faded the way base housing always did, quietly replaced by the next season of trying to belong somewhere. The invisibility was not new. I had been practicing it long before her. She just gave it a face I could not ignore. Looking back now, I laugh a little at that twelve-year-old version of me pedaling past her house like it meant something cosmic. Jesus Almighty. I thought one girl noticing me might repair everything that felt unfinished inside my chest. It was never about April. It was about a boy who wanted proof that he existed outside his own head. The truth is harsher and cleaner now. Nobody arrived to make me whole. I learned to stand there, unseen, and open anyway.

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

Cheese Metal Belonging – Day 38

February 1, 2026February 1, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

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.

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

Borrowed Fire- Day 37

January 31, 2026January 31, 2026 ljandkariLeave a comment

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.

Tag: South Side Trails