Still a groupie after all these years…

Last night dredged up some good ol’ nostalgia for me. I went to this little hole in the wall bar to watch a couple of my friends newest band the Laureates. I’ve known the drummer since I was 16 years old and would watch him and 6 or 7 of my friends learn how to make music in his parents’ basement when we were in high school. I watched him play and truly saw that he had at some point stopped looking like a kid and now look liked a man. I looked around the room at several of the faces that I’ve known for some 12 years and realized that they all had morphed into a grown-up version of their previously awkward selves. I don’t know when this happened. These were the same faces I had seen all summer at various events and I hadn’t noticed before. Standing there in the middle of these changed faces I starting to think of what else has changed and so as the band played on I transported myself back to those days in my friends basement… I reminisced about how we all met, how I was so happy to have met people I could be myself around, how we’d sit in my friends room all night never doing anything, free midnight movies, trash night, sledding on death hill, playing video games, and a billion more memories… I reflected on how we all started getting a handle on who we were together, whether we were all with each other in college or not, how I would drive 14 hours to U of I for the weekend just to go to a party, who I know because of those trips, who I am because of those trips… Coming home after college unsure of what I wanted and where I wanted to be and how these people made this place feel like home… Having an incarnation of my friends’ band sleeping on my floor in a Queens apartment and finally understanding what family was… Being the person I have become and being loved unconditionally through all of my incarnations. For someone like myself who feels alone roughly 98% of the time I realized I am one of the luckiest people in the world to have friends like mine. Like a song that always gives you pause when you hear it I relished the nostalgia and walked home with a dreamy little smile on my face.