I bought a DVD player at Goodwill yesterday and five rom-coms to play on it. I’ve decided I’m going to resort back to the older days. Checking books out from the library. Sleeping with my phone in the kitchen. Knocking on my neighbor’s door when I need a half cup of milk instead of Instacarting a gallon.

I bought wired headphones, and I promise I’m not trying to be performative by doing this. But I do believe the Wi-Fi, the Bluetooth, the constant connection, I mean it’s got to be making us all clinically insane, right?

Bring me back. Bring me back. Bring me back.

I went south for my uncle’s funeral, and the church it was held in still had hymn books and Bibles tucked into the backs of the pews. The stained-glass windows made rainbows dance across the floor, and I felt a nostalgia rise in the pit of my throat. It was a feeling I’d been missing.

I want out of this over-consuming, digitalized, monotonous life I’m being surrounded by. GOD, OUR PARENTS WERE RIGHT. IT IS THAT DAMN PHONE!

Bring me to the river. Bring me to the dragonflies.

Bring me to paying with cash and pennies and concert tickets that don’t cost my rent. I want to see live music and not have to open up a credit card to do so.

Bring me to falling asleep to the sound of cicadas and handwritten letters and doors that people still knock on.

Remember when you logged off the internet? Now we never log off. But you should. Log off. Sit with your thoughts. Read a book without your phone sitting next to you. Cook a meal without something playing in the background. Move your body to nothing but the sound of your breath. Drive your car without your phone. I bet you’d feel like you’d left a limb at home.

Maybe that’s what I’m asking for when I say bring me back. Not to some rose-tinted version of the past, but to a life where I am actually there for it.

I want to be bored again. I want to be unreachable. I want to remember what it feels like to sit somewhere without documenting it, to listen without reaching for something else, to let a moment pass without wondering what it would look like on a screen.

Maybe we don’t need to go back. Maybe we just need to log off.

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It doesn’t feel very heavy typing it out like that. Like, out of the billions of people on earth, I’m only mentioning two.

Sometimes I’m writing in my journal (yes, I have a real hardback Moleskine journal because the Notes app is not sufficient enough for everything I have to say) and I’ll look down at my handwriting and realize it looks just like my late grandmother’s.

It scares me sometimes. The fact that so many people live inside of me.

I mean the amount of generations of lives that somehow live inside me is intense. The people who came before me, whose hands looked different from mine but whose handwriting I might inherit. Their fears, their habits, their grief. The things they healed from and the things they never did.

Sometimes it makes me feel less lonely. Like I’m not doing this alone. I’m not here by happenstance.

My grandmother, the other one, not the grandmother I lost, never healed from her traumatic childhood. And somehow that shit lives inside me.

Cut me open and take it out, please. Let me start fresh. I beg of you.

I’m sad in a let-me-get-high-and-stare-at-the-ceiling-fan-until-it-starts-to-speak-to-me kind of way. Storms by Fleetwood Mac and Quiet, The Winter Harbor by Mazzy Star are records spinning in my brain, around and around and around.

Grief is the other side of love. Someone told me that back in January when my grandma passed. I think of it often. To love someone as much as I did comes at a cost because nothing in life is free.

I will sit here, joint burning in my right hand, the ash hitting the carpet that I’ll vacuum up come morning, and Mazzy Star spinning around, filling the air.

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“See for me that her hair's hangin' down / That's the way I remember her best.”

They lay in bed while she traced her fingertips over the tattoos on his arm. It lulled him into that strange place between asleep and awake, where he was only dimly aware of her body pressed against his and the rhythmic rattle of the train outside shaking the apartment windows.

Later, they’d sit on the narrow balcony, passing a joint back and forth. Her lungs felt heavy, her bones light.

Weekends were their favorite. They’d disappear into the apartment, living off sandwiches and frozen pizza, not getting out of bed until noon. They’d binge-watch some early-2000s show or put on a comedy that only seemed funny because they were high.

Sometimes they’d wander into a speakeasy or a jazz bar. Their old haunts smelled too much like stale beer now, and they’d discovered they preferred drinking from heavy glass instead of plastic cups. Funny how getting older announces itself in such small ways.

She’d drag him back to her hometown, windows down, pointing out the parking lot where she’d learned to drive, the house where her best friend lived, the restaurant where she’d worked her first job.

“This town doesn’t have much,” he’d say.

She’d look out the window instead of answering. Sure, it didn’t have much but it held her entire life. He wouldn’t understand that yet.

He’d turn on Alice in Chains, and suddenly she’d want to throw herself out of the moving car.

Put on Johnny Cash, she wanted to say.

Can we listen to Bob Dylan instead?

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I hope this finds you well.

Apologies for the nearly month-long hiatus since my last article. Thankfully for you, autumn is fast approaching and with it, my seasonal depression, which, historically, means I’ll be writing a lot more.

Nature is quite loud, don’t you think?

I can hear the breathing of the flowers, the buzz of the bees, the trickle of water. I feel the crickets, already restless, waiting to sing their nightly tune. The clouds hang low above me, and I think maybe one day I’ll reach my hand out and run my fingers through them until they dissolve into nothing.

I have witnessed both birth and death this year. At their core, the similarities bleed through. We come from dust and to dust we shall return.

Motherhood is a beautiful thing, one that I have been lucky enough to experience from the passenger seat. One day, God willing, I’ll be in the driver’s seat. But for now, I watch in awe of the beauty, resilience, and strength it takes to be a mother. To laugh after something as immense as childbirth is something I genuinely believe only a woman could do.

As I sit here, surrounded by life in all its forms, I can feel the earth pulsing around me. Nothing in this garden exists in isolation. Every flower leans toward the sun. Every bee depends on another bloom. Every tree was once held together by a seed no bigger than a fingertip.

I sit alone as I write this, but not really. Even my future children exist within me now, carried only as possibility, known only to God and to time. I find comfort in this.

Somewhere, six miles from here, a little girl is taking her first breaths.

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"One day I am gonna grow wings / A chemical reaction."
— "Let Down," Radiohead

She looks over at him and says. “Close your eyes, spin around, and whatever direction you’re pointing, go.”

He looks back at her and, despite being comfortable against the tree stump, he obliges. He gets up, spins around, and points. They’re in the woods, so the direction doesn’t mean anything to him, but he watches her hold her phone toward his finger, the compass app open on the screen. She swallows hard.

“West,” she says, and leaves it at that.

It’s three p.m. in California, six p.m. here, and that crushes her for some reason. Not being in the same time zone as certain people makes her feel dizzy. Time being relevant and all that.

The sun is still warm on her skin, and they both fall into that place where they’re half awake, half dreaming, where floating feels like something attainable in this life. She dreams of sitting in the backseat of his car, her feet pulled up beneath her, her head resting against the headrest. In this dream state she wonders what it all means, but knows she won’t find the answer at the end of a blunt or the bottom of a bottle. Even if she did, she wouldn’t listen to it anyway.

She always gets a little restless come Fridays. She misses people she shouldn’t and craves drinks and dinner and long talks on a patio, the sound of crickets and someone absentmindedly flicking a lighter on and off luring her into a trance.

She has energy built up, ready to be spent.

Despite being in the woods, she can hear the motorbikes on the highway swerving through traffic like they don’t have family waiting at home. Maybe they don’t, but we all come from somewhere. Whether we’re proud of it or not, none of us were born out of thin air.

Now flags whip in the wind, and lake water sprays into her eyelashes. She’s no longer in the woods or in a car, but on a boat. She blinks the water from her eyes and remembers the summers they all spent at the lake, drunk on the sun and life and each other.

Every time she opens Instagram she sees engagements, weddings, baby announcements, and she feels detached from these worlds people have found themselves in. She’s happy for them in a different sort of way. There’s a slight tang of jealousy, but an even greater sense of relief.

He shakes her awake, the sun now dipping below the tree line. They both walk back in silence, buzzing at their fingertips and toes, sleep still hanging around the corners of their eyes.

She thinks to herself that despite the gray outlines of her life, grief, sorrow, depression, the center is bright, expanding past its borders. She feels her chest blooming with warmth, as though something behind her ribs has finally remembered how to grow.

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Thank you all for your endless support of Hannah Writes. I published my first post in April 2025, and I feel so grateful to have been writing here for over a year now. Along the way, I’ve gotten to know so many wonderful friends, mutuals, and subscribers, and that has been one of the greatest gifts of this little corner of the internet.

Today I turn 26, which I’m choosing to feel optimistic about rather than worried. It sounds old when I say it to my fifteen-year-old cousin, but in the grand scheme of things, I’m still quite young.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read my words, support my writing, and maybe even buy me a coffee. It means more to me than you know.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

With so much gratitude,

Hannah Writes

She only ever felt urgency after four p.m. Anything before that didn’t seem to count for much. She’d often skip breakfast, substituting it with a cigarette (non-performative) and a cup of coffee full of cream and sugar. Both would suffice until she became ravenous around two or three in the afternoon, when she’d consume whatever was in sight. A bag of popcorn, sour straws, grapes by the handful, buttered toast.

She went out most nights, and when she did she’d take her drink outside, lean against the brick wall, smoke another cigarette (performative), and try to catch the eye of a stranger. But she found men would only approach her if she’d already done the work for them.

She had it down to a system: eye contact, look away, smile for no reason. The second time, eye contact again and brush her hair over her shoulder, because when she was tipsy she tended to believe her collarbones were attractive. The third time, eye contact, glance at his lips, look away just as he noticed. By the fourth, he was usually already walking over.

She never went home with these men or invited them back to her place. Sure, she’d make out with them until her lips were bruised, but sleeping with them was a line she wouldn’t cross.

Not because she was waiting for someone or because she believed in saving herself for anything. She simply liked the part before and the possibility of it all. The exchange of names she’d forget by morning. The feeling of being wanted without the burden of being known.

And around two in the morning, after enough cigarettes and enough conversations that meant nothing, she’d call an Uber home alone. Wash the smell of smoke from her hair, crawl into bed and wake up the next afternoon hungry again.

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Kenz and I are sitting in front of the studio, feet tucked beneath us, the sun beaming down on our faces, when she says, “I feel like you have a completely different life sometimes.”

“I do,” I respond honestly. “But this one feels like my real life.”

It’s hard to shed yourself from friendships and places that no longer serve you, but it has to be done. My yoga mentor, Jeanne, once said when talking about why we teach yoga, “We do it because it must be done.”

We do it because it must be done.

I think you could put that in place of a lot of things. We leave shitty relationships because it must be done. We move away from cities that make us feel small because it must be done. We build lives that honor our true intentions because it must be done.

For a long time, I confused familiarity with belonging. Just because something had been in my life for years didn't mean it deserved a permanent residence there. I stayed loyal for no reason at all and I kept friendships alive out of history alone.

There was a time when I thought I owed everyone access to me forever. That if someone knew me when I was younger, they somehow had a claim to every version that came after. But growing has taught me that love and history are not contracts. People can be meaningful and still belong in the past.

It's not to say I'll never see those people or that town again. But knowing they are no longer the center of my universe is such a great relief. There is something beautiful about realizing that life keeps unfolding.

Being a part of this new community is inspiring me in ways I always dreamed of. I leave class and sit in the sun with people who make me laugh. I have conversations that light me up. I find myself excited about the future in a way I haven’t been in years. And sometimes I catch myself looking around and think, this is it. This is the life I was trying so hard to find.

My mid-twenties have taught me a lot, but only now am I learning that I didn’t have to stay there.

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I was seated on the couch, legs crossed under me, my sandals abandoned on the floor. My hair was very long back then, falling halfway down my back, and I think I wore it natural that night. I was in a long sundress and wearing too many bracelets. I was pleasantly drunk off sauvignon blanc and would’ve been content staying seated on that couch the rest of the evening until he walked up to me, grabbed my hand, and suddenly I was gone. Wine glass left on the table, shoes where I’d left them, his hand in mine. Always trying to get me to dance with him, which I happily obliged. A Sade song was playing, I think, which made me feel like I was in Sex and the City. My friends joined around us, making it less about the two of us and more about everyone as a whole, which I didn’t mind.

“To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost, by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.”
— Anthony Bourdain

The song ended and everyone scattered like ants. To the bathroom, to the bar, to smoke a cigarette. It was just him and me left, my arms hung at my sides and I had nothing to say, nothing to offer. He walked over to me and brushed my hair behind my ear, saying nothing and everything all at once, and it drove me fucking insane. I took a deep breath and looked up at him. He was so beautiful. So beautiful that I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to recreate him through art. Trying to capture his aura, his laugh, his mannerisms. Down to my bones, he was the love of my life. How cruel of the world not to make me his.

I broke out of his trance and excused myself, just to find my breath again. I went over to Nick and asked for something to smoke, then leaned against the railing and took in the city beyond us. Nick brushed his shoulder against mine and gave me a weak smile. He knew what was bothering me without either of us saying it out loud.

And it’s funny, my world back then was smaller than it is now, but I’ve never met someone who made the world feel as big as it did when he was around me.

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Jesus, it feels like all I’ve done since turning twenty-five is look back on my life, which in the grand scheme of things has barely been a blip, and still I can’t seem to stop asking how. How did I end up there to here? How did I become this version of myself? Lord only knows how I’ll feel when, God willing, I am seventy. No wonder older people sit around on porches for hours. You could sit there all day long tracing the seasons of your life and still not hit every mark, still not fully understand every version of yourself that had to exist in order to become who you are now.

It’s a pretty incredible thing when you think about it, this life and all its seasons, or whatever you want to call them.

I had a really bad weekend, the kind that levels you in ways you didn’t know were possible. I won’t get into it because I’ve already set it down and made my peace where I can, but to say the least, I don’t ever want to experience anything like that again. I truly think my heart would give out if I had to.

And speaking of the heart, isn’t it strange how little we think about it considering it never gets a break? From the moment you are born until the moment you die, it just keeps going, constant work, around the clock, carrying you through every beautiful thing, every terrible thing, every ordinary Tuesday, every grief, every joy.

I mean seriously really think about that. How tirelessly your heart has kept you here.

So maybe, just for a moment, it deserves your gratitude. Not for doing anything extraordinary, but simply for never stopping, for carrying you through it all. It’s something you hear a lot in yoga, if you ever find yourself there. Come back to your heart. Your heart. Your heart. I used to brush it aside, but maybe there’s something to being pulled back to the one thing that has kept you going this whole time.

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B,

I miss you. My memory used to be really bad back then, because of everything I was putting my body through but it’s all coming back now. The remembering.

I’ll be sitting down, eating dinner or reading a book, and it hits me in the gut. Not like a thought but more like something physical.

Just because something doesn’t include suffering doesn’t mean it isn’t worth your while.

Do you understand what I mean by that, B? I think you do. You’ve never been very kind to yourself. To others, yes, but to yourself, you always fell short.

We don’t talk about serious things like that anymore. But the last time I was over, I saw the pill bottles on the counter. It made me feel small. Like a child seeing something they weren’t supposed to.

Anyway—

I even miss that dimly lit, smoky bar we’d find ourselves in every Tuesday and Thursday night. Huddled into some random booth in the corner, the rest of the world feeling galaxies away. Pressed up against the windowsill, the blur of lights outside turning us into silhouettes.

It was like someone pressed fast forward on time. Before we ever knew it, we were being kicked out “Closing Time” playing loudly over the speakers, as if anyone drunk would make the connection that it was time to go home.

I miss you so much I’ve resorted to sending you a letter instead of a text message, because somehow that feels safer. Like maybe it’ll get lost in the mail, or arrive a month late and by then I’ll have forgotten everything I wrote.

I’ve been having dreams about you. They follow me into the day, replaying in that way that’s less visual and more like a feeling. Something that settles deep in the pit of my stomach.

I feel homesick for you. Even though we aren’t like that anymore.

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We talk every day. I see her, on average, once a week, and yet she has no idea that I write.

I wanted to interrupt her and say, Well, Mama, I do write.
Actually, I have written an entire book, but you made me a perfectionist, and because of that it will never be good enough in my eyes to deserve existing anywhere beyond the confines of my laptop. It will never be perfect to me, and so it will never see the light of day.

Don’t you know I have been writing ever since I learned how?

Ever since I first bought that dollar store spiral notebook and began making feelings too large for my own body smaller by setting them onto paper, I have written. I have written when I was happy, when I was grieving, when I was angry at the world, and when I was in love with it. I have written through every version of myself I have ever been.

And somehow the woman who knows me best does not know that at all.

Maybe that is what is strangest about love: that someone can know the sound of your laugh, the cadence of your footsteps, the exact expression you make when you are trying not to cry, and still not know the most sacred parts of you. Still not know the private little things that make you who you are when no one else is watching.

Maybe no one ever really knows anyone as wholly as we like to believe they do.

So instead I just briefly agreed with her. Yeah, Mama, maybe one day, and changed the subject, because writing is made up of the most intimate parts of me, and there is still some part of me relieved to have this corner of my life separate from the rest of it.

Because once people in the real world find this, all my guards will go up. And I know once that happens, my writing will go to shit, because I can only write about the things I do not know how to say out loud.

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You got onto me for plucking at the mint for our iced tea.

“Grab the scissors and cut just above the leaf node.”

“Leaf node?”

“Where two leaves meet at the stem,” you said gently, like it was something I should already know.

I did as you said so your mint would grow back double next year. Little did I realize you wouldn’t be around to see it.

Now I pluck at it one leaf at a time, knowing it won’t grow back the same, and I feel guilt settle deep in my belly. I fall to my knees and sob, because why the fuck is a mint plant making me miss you so much today?

Your presence is everywhere here on the farm. I want, desperately, to get in my car and drive miles away to somewhere your memory can’t find me but I don’t.

Later, I’m sitting on the porch with my grandfather and I hear your voice. I freeze, momentarily stunned, until I look over and see him playing a video of you on his iPhone, just to hear you again. Just to hear your voice.

You are missed in great depths here on Earth.

I excuse myself and go inside. The house feels quieter than it should. Like it’s holding its breath. I climb into your bed. If I stay still enough, I can almost see you through the sheer curtains, out in your garden moving slowly, hands in the dirt, showing me where to cut so something might grow back fuller next time.

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I watch a lily pad drift on the surface of the water and try to summon a frog to meet it, to complete the image in a way that feels symbolic, but nothing happens. The water stays still, the moment refuses to perform.

Lately I’ve felt out of touch with nature, and I tell myself it’s because I keep asking my grandmother for signs and she hasn’t sent any. Or maybe she has, and I keep missing them. I try to assign meaning to the butterflies, how they appear each time I step outside, but they vanish too quickly to feel like anything deliberate. And anyway, it’s spring. Of course there are butterflies. Not everything is a message, even when I desperately want it to be.

Mary Oliver once wrote, “The leaf has a song in it.” Do you believe that? I used to, and I hope one day I come back to the truth of that sentence. But for now, a leaf is a leaf and that is all.

If you see me with everything I deserve just know I waited my turn. I waited my turn. I have waited my turn.

Spring makes me miss my friends in high school. Sitting on the roof of someone’s car, passing a blunt or a cigarette to one another, this was back when I cared very little about what I put into my body. When I starved myself of the care I deserved. Back when things were more fun because we weren’t supposed to be doing them.

I look around at my life now and I feel so much gratitude. I feel love pouring out of my mouth onto my lap, all glitter and gold and heavenly. I feel gratitude, and yet the grief and sadness still linger nearby. I will never fully recover from either, from the trenches I dragged myself through. Maybe that is how I can have gratitude. How I can have empathy for myself and others.

I hold secrets of people I will never see again in the palm of my hand, and I feel blessed to have even gotten the chance to know them at all.

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“Now do you see what I mean?” you ask.

“Yes. Yes, I see now,” I say after catching my breath.

We bond over our alcoholic family members, because what better way is there to get to know someone than through shared trauma. We complain about our boss, even though most of the time she’s great, but sometimes being around her feels like walking on eggshells.

Later we go to a friend’s birthday hangout, surrounded by people five years younger than us. The girls are outside smoking cigarettes, a guy in the kitchen is packing a bowl, and the whole scene feels like stepping back into a life that no longer belongs to me.

We leave early, and you say, “I feel bad, but I was definitely judging those girls for smoking cigarettes.”

I tell you I was too, but then again that was me in another life. You pause and say, “I guess you’re right. I just didn’t realize how young we were back then.”

We part ways and head home and I feel relieved to no longer be twenty years old, when everything feels performative.

Being around you has reminded me what it feels like to have a best friend again, and it makes me think about my childhood best friend who moved to California. I like to tease my friends who move to the other side of the country that the West Coast eats people, that once you go there, you never quite come back. They don’t understand the joke the way I do, because I’m the one who never got eaten. I stayed here, mostly unmoved, living within about a hundred-mile radius of where I grew up.

I’ve lived in almost every city surrounding my hometown, trying them all on for sport, but only now do I finally have a reason to stop thinking about leaving. My roots run too deep here, and time with family feels too rare to spend it anywhere else. The death of my grandmother has awakened something in me that I didn’t even know was there.

My heart is still heavy, and my grief sporadic. It moves quietly in the background of things, appearing when I least expect it. Perhaps it will always be lingering nearby. Because maybe once grief has sunk its teeth into you, you never escape from it ever again.

A child said, “Is there a dream bigger than going home?”

No, there isn’t.

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But in that life, I do not get you.

And I don’t understand why the life I feel destined for is the very thing that takes me away from you. Why wanting more means losing what I love. I cannot have both in this lifetime, and that truth devastates me in a way I don’t know how to survive.

And maybe what terrifies me most is not the leaving but the possibility that one day, if I stay, I will resent you for the life I never lived.

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The sun slips between the trees in long streaks of light. My cat lies beneath them, stretched out, bathing her fur in warmth. The lake laps slowly at the shore, steady and repetitive, meditative enough to quiet everything else.

I burn incense to keep the mosquitoes away. Smoke drifts through the air. You adjust the strap of my bathing suit where it’s twisted, then let your hand fall back to your side.

I take off running, bare feet through the yard, toward the water and I know you’ll follow right behind me. You always do. You’d follow me into hell if I walked in first.

The sun burns my skin. The lake takes me away. I float until my fingers wrinkle, until time feels relative.

You ask me to describe the perfect day
and I say I can hear the dogs barking in the yard
because the screen door is wide open.

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“So, you see, while some perceive winter as a festive time when their worlds are blanketed by the purity of snow, others feel that they are being suffocated by a literally colorless existence.”

- Jessica Blaszczak, 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Seasonal Affective Disorder

I was born in the middle of summer. My mom told me I cried until the moment they placed me beneath the warm light to clean me off. As soon as the brightness hit my skin, I settled. Content once again as if my body already knew what it needed.

When I was still an infant, they took a trip to the British Virgin Islands. She put me in a tiny sunhat and sat me in the sand, and I was, according to her, the happiest baby she’d ever seen. All it took was warm air on my skin. That’s it, that’s always been it.

So it’s no surprise that my body recoils at winter. My soul has been tethered to warmth since the moment I arrived. Summer asks nothing of you. Drink a tall glass of water, sit on the front porch, let the heat press into you and you’re doing life correctly.

Winter, on the other hand, demands performance. We must celebrate, be grateful, be cheerful, be full of joy. And I am anything but. I want to curl into my bed and disappear. I want to erase every good habit I painstakingly built throughout the year. Wipe the slate clean and just leave me alone.

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The holidays are always a letdown because the expectations are unbearable. That’s why Christmas drifts farther and farther from what it once felt like each year a little more distant, a little less magic. Maybe I sound bitter but that’s because I am.

I miss the sun and the warm solid earth beneath my feet. Maybe I’d love the holidays if I lived by the ocean, if Christmas Eve meant suntanning instead of small talk. If only I could feel vitamin D soak into my skin and bring me back to life.I lose myself every winter and finding my way back to myself is an excruciating process.

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I graduated from college a little over two years ago, which still feels impossible. I hear the girls in yoga chatting about finals and heading home for break, and their lives feel like parallel universes to mine, close enough to touch, but just far enough that I can’t step back into them.

Lately I’ve been listening to my old Spotify playlists from high school, which has been a trip. They remind me of when I could afford recklessness. When the world felt wide open in the way only teenagers believe it will stay forever. One song reminds me of when I drove to the next town over to buy weed from a guy named Cole.

My friend and I pulled into the gas station parking lot, and there he was leaned back in his car with the windows down, J. Cole playing loud enough to announce his presence before we even rolled in. He tipped his chin at us in that lazy, practiced way before getting out. We stayed in our car, rolled down the window, and eyed the little bag he pulled from the pocket of his zip-up.

“Wait,” I said, “that’s it?”

He stared at the bag, then at us, like I’d already smoked half of it. “Yeah?”

My friend and I locked eyes and burst out laughing, cheeks flushed from the cold and the absurdity. “Cole, how are we supposed to smoke that?”

He looked annoyed, like we were wasting his evening. He glanced around the parking lot, then back at us. “Lots of ways, Han. YouTube it.”

“No, no wait,” I pleaded. “Can you just… roll us a joint? Or a blunt? Or whatever?”

He tipped his chin to the sky and took a breath like he was negotiating with fate. “It’ll be an extra five.”

We agreed instantly. We didn’t have the time, brain cells, or equipment to figure anything else out. We were restless and impatient to be high. So he climbed back into his car, rolled up the windows, and got to work.

Not long after, we were flying down the interstate, crossing back over the city-limit sign toward the nearest hay field where we wouldn’t get caught trespassing. The weed was crappy, but we got high anyway. This was back when I could smoke and not spiral, when getting high meant laughing until tears slipped down the sides of my face and my chest burned in a way that actually felt good. We drove home afterward, another thing that feels unthinkable now, but at the time was just teenage logic. Invincibility, or the illusion of it.

I don’t know where Cole is anymore, and my friend moved across the country. It’s strange, isn’t it? How people can be so close to you physically, emotionally, circumstantially and then suddenly they’re not. How a moment that once felt permanent becomes just another piece of memory you only stumble back into because an old song found its way into your headphones.

The passing of time makes me feel dizzy sometimes. Like I look back and see all the versions of myself I’ve been, all the people I stood beside, and for a second I’m not sure how I got from there to here.

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Sure, I have people here I grab coffee or dinner or a drink with. But they don’t hold a candle to my friends. You know the ones, the ones who’ve seen you at your worst and at your best. The ones you can recognize by the sound of their footsteps. The ones you can sit beside in a car in total silence without it meaning anything except comfort. I’m sure you know exactly who I’m talking about. And if you don’t, one day you will. You have to. Because they’re what make all of this worthwhile.

Good company and a southern sky, that’s really all I need to be content in this lifetime. I don’t ask for much, but I do ask for this. Give me my friends in the afterlife, and every parallel universe beyond it. Give me friends, and I will ask for nothing more. Give me my friends, and I will have everything I need for all of time.

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Our old hangout still sits on the same street corner it always has, stubborn and unchanged, like a relic refusing to accept time has moved on. It still has happy hour all-day on Thursday. It still smells like stale cigarette smoke. The neon sign still flickers like it’s fighting for its life. Everything is the same except for the one thing that mattered: my people are no longer there.

If I walked in tonight, Wes wouldn’t be in the back corner holding a pool stick, pretending he wasn’t about to hustle strangers for free drinks. Max wouldn’t be pacing near the karaoke sign-up sheet. Summer wouldn’t be leaning over the bar, ordering shots she insisted were “celebratory” even though we had absolutely nothing to celebrate most of the time.

It was never the place you planned to go. You didn’t text in the group chat. You didn’t coordinate. You just showed up, and somehow everyone else had already materialized there, in their unofficial assigned seats. Bodies in booths, elbows on sticky tables, laughs echoing off low ceilings. Filling every inch of the space with everything that makes your early twenties feel never-ending.

The strays we collected. The locals we adopted. The bartender who knew just enough about us to be questionable. The way eleven o’clock slipped into three a.m. like it was nothing. The music always a little too loud, the lighting a little too dim, and the world outside a little too far away.

I think about how many nights we spent there. How many confessions were pulled out of us by cheap drinks and the illusion of intimacy. How many questionable choices were made in that dim bathroom with its broken lock and guilt-colored lighting. The kind of choices we promised we’d “never speak of again,” and mostly didn’t.

Back then, we thought the nights would last forever. We thought there would always be another Thursday, another round, another “you won’t believe what happened last night,” another version of us leaning into the chaos like we craved it.

But now the bar is just a bar. A place on a corner. A place that stayed the same even though we didn’t.

Sometimes I walk past it and glance through the window, not because I’m hoping to see anyone, just out of habit. The same way your body remembers old routes even after you’ve moved. New people sit where we used to. They order the same cheap drinks. They laugh too loudly. They have no idea they’re reenacting a life that used to feel like everything to us.

And that’s fine. It’s theirs now.

The truth is, we didn’t outgrow the bar so much as we slipped out the door one night and didn’t find a reason to go back. There’s nothing tragic about that. It’s just how things go. One day a place is your entire orbit, and then suddenly it’s not, and the world keeps spinning without asking your permission.

What stays with me is the nostalgia, sure. But more than that, it’s the almost funny realization that we truly thought those nights would last forever. They didn’t. They weren’t supposed to.

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