This story contains themes of loss and grief that may be triggering to some readers.
There’s a cluster of redwood trees behind my apartment building.
Trees have a way of making you consider time and how it’s moving in relation to your own life.
Personally, the speed in which my life moves now has entered a kind of science fiction warp mode.
Each day, after my son leaves for school, I push his bedroom window wide open.
I open the window to air out his hormone laden lair. (He’s a teenager.)
I raise the blinds up as high as they’ll go.
Around 3 p.m. when he returns, he’ll quickly shut the window with an exaggerated slam, along with a forceful yank on the blackout blinds.
I won’t see him again until dinner time.
But in the morning, when I know he’s walking to his middle school, I enter without my usual knock and take advantage of these moments of still being in charge.
And, if I’m being honest, to feel like I’m still his mom. I look around his space without explicit permission. Nudging my way into his room—and his life—for a little bit longer.
As a bonus, I get to see the branches of the redwood trees behind our building sway in the wind.
I take a minute to breathe the outside air. I search for birds and squirrels. Dark wings spread here and there, darting beneath a leaf, temporarily disappearing, only to emerge with a giant swoop in full flight. I notice squirrels making their way up or down, inspiring me to get going.
The trees tower over much of the houses and buildings on our block. They are hundreds of years old and have watched over this building since it was built in 1924 and well before.
My own time in middle school feels like a lifetime ago, but when you’re the steward of another person’s pilgrimage through it, your own time spent there comes back to you in flashes.
What you wore, how you got back and forth from school, the books you read and the teachers that you loved or hated the most.
There are three names in particular that I think of when I go back to middle school in my mind.
Darlene.
Jennifer.
Alicia.
These are the names of the people in the only picture I have left of middle school.
Each time I go through old photos, I pull this one out and take a minute with it.
I am standing with them in the picture. It’s middle school graduation, 1984.
Our smiles are of the shit-eating grin type. We are the belles of the ball. Queens of Robinson Middle school for one last moment before our transfer to high school throws us back to the beginning of the line.
Our long hair is pulled back in colored barrettes, our arms linked at the shoulders. We wear white gowns. Our feet and skinny legs poke out below, covered in tan nylon. The four of us sport identical versions of a kind of wooden kitten heel and leather straps popular at the time.
When I look at the photo, I can almost smell Love’s Baby Soft perfume and Aqua Net hairspray.
It’s a spooky photo to me now.
It’s a spooky photo not because it’s an old photo, but because of the three young girls in this middle school photo, I’m the only one still alive.
I’ve always had a tendency to make friends with the wild girl:
The girl who laughs the loudest.
The girl who knows where the parties are.
The girl who has sex before anyone else.
The girl who smokes pot first.
The girl who takes LCD first.
The girl who disobeys her parents .
The girl who sneaks out.
The girl who takes the most risks.
I was never any of those things, but it makes sense to me now that I was their friend and vice versa.
I was the Yin to their Yang.
A reliable calmness in a relentless storm:
I would get them home.
I would hold their hair back as they retched.
I would not let them go home with that guy.
I would hold them back as they tried to hop inside the weird car.
I would pour them glasses of water before bed.
I would encourage them to leave the party before something bad happened.
But I couldn’t be there for them all of the time.
And bad things did happen.
The three of them, in their own time, will get into the wrong cars, will date the wrong guys, will take too many drugs and will drink too much.
And before you know it, and before I or them are ready, they will die.
Darlene will die in a car accident with her high school boyfriend at age 17.
His red sports car wrapped around a tree. They will be thrown from the car.
Darlene’s parents will be asked only what she was wearing as her body is too damaged for them to view in the morgue. Her boyfriend will suffer brain damage from the accident and never be the same.
He will spend five years in prison for vehicular homicide.
Jennifer will get addicted to heroin in her twenties and spend many years in and out of treatment, only to overdose in a seedy apartment building, leaving behind two small children.
Alicia is the most surprising to hear about. It’s only this last year that I found out.
I heard through the grapevine that she was recently divorced and having a much needed girls night out. Smoking a fentanyl laced joint was her quick and unfair end.
She also left behind children, but at least they were grown.
I look at this photo of the four of us now with an investigative eye.
Does it look like any of us will be anything other than happy in our future lives?
It’s still one of the best days I can remember. I loved that year in middle school. I had these amazing, fun, crazy, silly friends by my side making it even more magical. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much or as hard as I did with the three of them.
My son has a few close friends at school, and I try to imagine what the future holds for him and them.
There’s a photo I have that his teacher shared with me from a field trip to a local park when he was in 7th grade.
The kids are piled high in a human pyramid. My son is on the bottom left, and his smile is huge, as are all the others. I can’t imagine anything bad happening to any of them in this moment.
So much promise, so much to look forward to.
None of us knows what awaits us as we meander through our lives, certainly not in middle school, when it feels like it’s just the beginning of something.
I try to picture my son’s future all the time. It’s futile.
Maybe it’s best to be like the trees. Observing from above as the years pass.
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