On the first day of kindergarten,
The one at the little
School in our little town,
I didn’t know you existed.
When I finally met you on the playground
That week –
The playground
Behind the school
Where the younger kids went
For recess –
We became best friends.
We sat together
In the classroom
At story time
On the rug,
The one with all the different shapes
And colors.
On the weekends
We would beg our parents
To schedule “play dates”
For us.
Our lives went on
And as I grew,
You all did too.
We played basketball
Or hockey
Or soccer
Together in the gym,
The one with the tan flooring
And the red bleachers.
None of us were good,
But that didn’t matter to us yet.
As we all grew older,
We made the transition from
“play dates” to “hanging out”
On the weekend.
We would talk for hours
About things.
Just things.
It never really mattered what.
And I would help you
With your homework
Or you would help me
With mine
Because we could never understand
The mystery that was math.
Then we would all gossip
About teachers,
The ones who were old
And cranky,
And we made our inside jokes
And laughed,
And planed
To hang out again
Soon,
Especially in the cheering section
At basketball games
In the gym,
The one with the tan flooring
And the red bleachers.
The years went by
And as they went
We grew closer.
Closer.
Closer.
All of you made more friends
And so did I,
But we would still be
Best friends.
All twenty of us.
Together.
Forever.
The years
Flew
By
And before we understood
How fast they’d gone
It was our last year in middle school.
Our eighth grade year,
The one we had talked about
All those years
Before.
Our class,
The one with all of us
Twenty eighth graders,
Had become a family.
We were inseparable.
We didn’t want it to end.
But that year
Flew
By
Too.
And soon we were getting ready
For our Confirmation.
Mega-Meetings every
Sunday
At noon
In the church,
The brick one that sat next to
Our school.
We picked our names
And our sponsors
And were confirmed by the Bishop.
And I was nervous,
But that was ok
Because so were the rest of you.
And we did it
Together.
When all that
Was over,
We still had our jokes,
Like the ones about the teachers.
And we still had our memories,
Like the ones from April Fool’s Day
And the other time when some
Of you put a phone in the ceiling
And called it.
Multiple times.
Just for laughs.
We kept growing
Closer.
Closer.
Closer.
We took our eighth grade trip,
The one to Nemacolin
Where we played games
And zip-lined.
And it finally dawned on us
That we wouldn’t have much time left
Together.
During the last dance of the school year,
The one in the gym
With the tan flooring
And the red bleachers,
We stood in a circle
And we all cried.
Because we knew that
Soon we would have to go
Our separate ways.
But we also knew that
“As we go on,
We’d remember
All the times
We had together.”
Our graduation mass
Was held a few days later
In the church,
The brick one that sat next to
Our school,
The school we now came to know
As our second
Home.
And I remembered
The first day of kindergarten,
The one at the little
School in our little town,
When I didn’t know
That any of you existed.
And I thought
Of how we all became
Best friends.
All twenty of us.
At the reception,
We watched a slide show
Of the pictures of us
From when we were babies
To how we look now.
Pictures of us
All together
And happy.
We knew we
Would be going
Our separate ways,
And
We all
Cried.
And
To this day,
I
Still
Cry.
But that’s ok
Because
“A lifetime’s
Not too long
To live
As
Friends.”