I went back home this past weekend for the first time in years. I wasn’t looking forward to boarding a plane, so I shoved as much as I could into a backpack in a haste the afternoon I flew out. I sat in the gate in a daze and stared out the window at the workers on the runway. But I had no reason to be hesitant. Ultimately, I was lucky and the flight both to and from my destination ended up being painless.

My trip back itself was lovely as well, but tinged with a dash of wistfulness. I met with an old friend in a coffee shop. I used to work with this friend in my 20s. She started as my supervisor at a grocery store. She had a distinctive lack of polish, a dirty sense of humor, and a penchant for distraction, so she was probably not the most natural choice to lead a group in a chaotic retail environment. But she had pushed for a leadership position in the back of the store, leading a group shopping for orders placed online. Once she got it, she hand-picked and approached me for a spot on her team, and I said yes despite the undesirable 4 am start time.

This launched a friendship that we’ve kept up for over a decade now. I was living on my parents’ couch at the time, would wake up in the middle of the night and sneak into the kitchen to make coffee in my french press. After knocking back 2-3 cups of inky black coffee, I would head out into the darkness myself, zooming over empty roads under the moonlight. Once there, she and I would spend the first 20 minutes watching videos on her phone, chatting about music, and generally slacking off.

Our friendship evolved from there. We went to a haunted house and laughed our butts off, gobbled weed brownies and stared into space in a trailer park, talked about god and the universe in shopping malls and parking lots and the Starbucks off the highway. We were both arrested development cases in hindsight – big kids navigating a world that wasn’t what we thought it would be.  

But eventually all of our stumbling paid off and we each moved on from the grocery store into stable, adult lives. She got a good, steady job first. I followed soon after as I started chasing jobs and money that I thought I wanted which would lead to a tumultuous five years for me, followed by a recent period of stability and calm.

Despite our different lives and paths, my friend will always be dear to me. But time and distance do have a tendency to numb these feelings out, so it was great for me to have the opportunity to meet up with her and be reminded of my past and the connection I have been so blessed to experience. Seeing my friend also reminded me how much we had changed, which was a reminder of how much time had passed, which is why my trip was tinged with a wistfulness. You can never go back, but looking back and seeing all that I’ve had has given me a burst of energy to move forward. I want to have and build the kind of experiences now that will give me grounding, comfort, and something to look back on in the future.