Growing
up in Old Forge was different for everyone. Either you didn’t have a lot of
friends, you had a moderate amount, or everyone in the entire school district knew
you, your brother, and your cousin’s child’s cat’s name.
I fit somewhere in the moderate
column. I had a few great friends, a few friends who flew off the rocker and
took others with them, and friends who I haven’t spoken to until recent Facebook
messages begging for drug money.
Currently I’m climbing my way to the
top of the “20 year old” mountain and I’m trying to stomp over the “16 year old
hill” that I can’t exactly seem to climb over. It feels like it’s way too easy
walking over this giant 20 year old mountain but excruciatingly difficult walking over the
16 year old one.
When I was sixteen I had a sturdy
amount of friends. Three different groups.
1. The Older Girls – Made up of about three girls who I was supposed to graduate with
in the year 2013. Lost touch, got it back, lost touch again. Currently
close with one of these girls.
2. The Girls. – Six girls who frequented the parties I would hold in the empty half of
my house. Always dancing, always singing, and always finding a way to make each
other smile. I speak to about four of them but within strange time frames due
to college, work, and relationships.
3. The Guys. - We coined the name O6 somewhere in the three years we were in each
other’s presence but never used it. It stood for Original Six and if you ask
half of them I’m sure they wouldn’t even remember it. These five guys tore me
from a terrible depression during my freshman year of high school which left me
with barely any friends. It started with bonfires, a lunch table, and then soon
we were having our very own parties.
We never really needed drugs and alcohol
because we were so hopped up on each other’s presence. If one of us didn’t like
something another one of us would. Each of us had such different styles and
tastes. We were below the “popularity” line but never really cared much for it
anyways. Life was late nights, mountain climbing, fort building, trips to
Walmart, dancing, house hopping, swimming pools, video games, screaming,
laughing, crying, singing, green grass, and black skies.
If anyone ever asks me what the best
year in my life was I would say my sophomore year. If anyone would ask me when
things started to decline it would be junior year. Girlfriends, boyfriends,
misunderstood feelings, cars, jobs, college decisions, family.
Have you ever broken a bone? Well,
whenever it’s about to rain you get this strange ache deep within your bones
that tells you way before it starts to pour. Junior year I had that in my
chest. I had that ache that told me that all of those beautiful moments that
make me smile when I close my eyes wouldn’t last forever. It was never
personal, it was always the system of life.
Senior year was the worst year of my
life. Until now I haven’t written about it in full and I will wait until I am
fully healed to do so but what I could say is that the ache that I felt turned
into a lightning strike straight to the heart. I almost didn’t make it. That’s
all I’ll say for now. I’ll say that I held on by the thread of my graduation cap.
I don't have many pictures of myself during the later half of my senior year but here's one a friend snapped of me in our "party house".
I want to go back to sophomore year so
bad, if not, than only once in a dream. I want to go to the football
games and jump fences. I want to talk about secrets and goals around a camp
fire again. But I don’t want to do any of this with my twenty year old self. I
want to do this with my sixteen year old self.
Here’s the kicker to it. I knew that
this was going to happen. Of course, I had no idea that things would end up the
way they have and if I had I would have transferred schools years ago. I’m not
lying.
I did, however, know that LIFE, as the adults put it, tears pieces apart
and glues them onto something else. Picture a painting with stunning blues and
greens. A giant hand comes down and tears off a piece. The hand then moves this piece onto a new painting filled with oranges and reds. “This is your new home.” The
hand says as it waves goodbye. The oranges and reds don’t know that the blues
and greens are different colors but the blues and greens know and they long to
be a part of that earthly painting it once was. Sure, it could be torn from the
new painting and glued onto the old one once more but the cracks around the edges of the tear will always show on the
surface. The painting will never be the same.
Here I type, during the summer after
my first freshman year of college. I’m sitting at the desk I have had since middle school. Sharpie
writings on it read different things in different languages that my poor father
has tried to wash clean for years. My favorite one lies just beneath my right
hand. In Korean it reads, “Even in the mouse hole, light shines.” Somewhere I
see that light shining and it’s becoming more and more beautiful by the day. I
have hope and that hope is the boots, rope, and gloves, on my journey up this “twenty
year old mountain”.
I
suppose I don’t really have a creative ending for you in this post, my readers so I'll leave you with something I had written about a week back on a Facebook
post which I’ll share below.
With so much love, Amber Allegrucci
