Madventures

3/12/23

Three years ago, the entire world shut down. 

Three years ago, I was just a senior in high school.

March 13th, 2020. The day that changed the lives of everyone. 

6 A.M. : I was getting ready for school one last time without knowing it. I put on a pink raincoat and leggings. Not knowing what the future was going to hold. 

8 A.M. : My lifelong friends and I were sitting in a classroom listening to our teacher explain that this may be the last day everyone gets to see each other. 

9 A.M. : COVID-19 news articles start flooding the media.

10 A.M. : Everyone is confused about what was happening. The whole day seemed different. Nothing felt normal. Everything felt chaotic.

11 A.M. : I sat at the circle lunch table with my friends one last time. Eating the most out-of-pocket lunch that the school served us. 

12 P.M. : Senioritis started to kick in. We were all crossing our fingers that we would get an extended week of spring break. 

1:30-ish P.M. : We received the news that schools were going to be shutting down temporarily. 

2:15 P.M. The final bell rang. 

“This is AMAZING”, we thought.

Everyone started flooding the hallways and gathering their belongings. We were all laughing, joking, and in disbelief that school has been postponed. We were excited to know that we had an extra week of spring break. 

Little did we know, we would never step inside that brick building again. 

That was the very last time all of our classmates were together at once. That was the end to what we have known from the time we entered pre-school to the time we were supposed to graduate. 

No prom, no senior trip, no senior skip day, no proper graduation. Everything was cut short without getting a chance to tell our friends goodbye and goodluck in the future. 

Somehow, this day seems like it was two seconds ago. How did we get here, three years later? 

………………………….

Now, life is different. We all grew up. 

We all have different lives now, yet we still have in mind that we are the same people who walked out of that brick building on March 13th, 2020.

I was humbly reminded of this last weekend. Our hometown friends decided to host a small-town get together. This consists of a garage, lifelong buddies, country music, and a Busch Light, or two (yuck, right?). We used to do this during our high school years after big Friday night wins, and any other chance we could. 

Anyways, this doesn’t happen often anymore. We somehow had all of our people back in the same area at the same time last weekend. It truly felt like home again. 

While a Tyler Childers song was blaring and people were roaming around chatting with each other to catch up, I overheard a conversation between some of the guys talking about memories and laughing about them. One said, “You guys used to do goofy things like that all the time.”

This grabbed my attention, and stopped me dead in my tracks. 

When did, “you guys ALWAYS do goofy things like that” turn into, “you guys USED to…” 

This hit me that we truly have grown up. Everything is a, “used to” now.  

Where did the time go between the time we went home from school one last time to now? How has it been three years? 

Three years worth of changing, growing, and becoming different people. The highschoolers who were once goofing off in the hallways three years ago, now have children. The boy in high school who could never stick with the same girl for more than two minutes, is now married. The star athletes under the Friday night lights are now off playing college sports, and the people who we never expected to graduate high school were the first to get their college degrees and are making more money than anyone can imagine. 

We are all living separate lives now.

However, all that mattered in this moment was that we were all together again. Singing country music at the top of our lungs, karoking, playing pool, catching up, and being the people we once knew. 

This moment made me realize that someday, these moments too, will seem so far away. We will all continue to change and go our separate ways. Six feet apart creeped into sixty miles apart. Someday, sixty miles will turn into six hundred miles- while we all continue to do bigger and better things.

These moments will turn into memories quicker than ice can melt. At the end of the night, we will all go home. Some will go back to college, some will go back to their new families, some will stay in touch, and some we will never hear from again. This is life. This is a part of growing up. Somehow I cannot grasp this concept because yesterday, we were teenagers with a varsity jacket on. Today we are mothers, fathers, college graduates, aunts, uncles, athletes, and so much more than a kid sitting at a desk waiting for the last bell to ring.