Remember back in college when you’d come home for Thanksgiving and your parents were there just being your parents and nothing much had changed and you wanted to scream, so you hit the local bar with friends from high school and you’d rage, rage against the dying of your Bud Light and chain smoke Marlboros and sing Aerosmith on the karaoke stage and when it got dark, dark and your voice was lost you made out with some guy whose name you don’t remember but he said he’d loved you since fourth grade and shit that was enough?
And at last call you did not go gently into that good night, instead you sloshed and whooshed, together, desperate, with old friends and lovers and threw up in the alley behind Seventh Avenue where your second-grade desk mate, the one who taught you how to pencil fight, held your hair back and you heaved and cried and hugged. Remember?
It’s like that, but it’s now. And it’s with different friends. Friends who get you, but get back then too. And we are still hiding from our parents. But now we are also hiding from our partners. From our kids and dogs and bosses and the turkey that’s starting to smell a little, but you’ve got time so everyone just calm the fuck down!
It’s like that, but it’s now, last night, and today. And things are different, but still very much the same, only there is no back-alley hair holding, just a couple gin and tonics and commiserating, in bed by ten, because you’re 42, not Taylor Swift 22 and you’ve learned your lessons and paid your dues and even though there are no weird guys who have loved you since fourth grade that’s best because if you had to train another boy or man or teenage man-boy how to pick a wet towel up from the floor you’d kill the whole lot of them.
It’s now, last night, and today and what I mean to say is that I’m thankful for my friends. All of them. In every stage of my life. Every place I’ve lived. Every season. I’m thankful for you and them and yes my mom and my partner and my kid, but mostly I’m thankful for all the ways we get each other through.
I hope you’re out there tonight, tomorrow, and the next with people who will get you through.❤️
M.
Melissa Goodnight 