Breaking up with forever

According to Snapchat, we can be best friends forever for $5.99. I don’t think we’d even have to do anything. I think we’d just have to pay $5.99, and then — eternity.

The cost of forever, in this case, is the price of a cappuccino — and isn’t that just heaven?

Speaking of heaven, there’s this song I love called “in heaven all the first kisses last much longer than a night,” by quinnie. I used to listen to it all the time over the summer on the walk home from O’Shag to Crossings.

I loved that walk home from O’Shag to Crossings, that liminal space between my work life on campus and my quiet life off of Twyckenham (with the quiet pond and my quiet room and my quiet fridge full of Trader Joe’s frozen food). 

I loved that walk home in my beat-up everything loafers which clicked and clacked on the sidewalk (I wore those shoes to death, to every occasion — to work, to class, to the DH, to first dates, to darties). No wonder the heel on my everything loafers are destroyed; no wonder I need to replace them. 

I loved that liminal space because, on Courtney Lane there was so much history and so much forever. 

I’d walk past Jordan Hall of Science (where that one guy kissed me that one time when I was a sophomore), past the Gug and the remnants of the torn-up tennis courts (where Brooke, Haley, Kathe and I played last spring), across Twyckenham Drive, past Danny Boy (where Elizabeth, Grace, and I sipped the spiciest margs of our lives).

I loved that liminal space because every monument was steeped in memory, a memory I can’t shake, a memory that will never return in the same form, a memory I swear is forever.

And all the while, I was looking back on everything that mattered there, this past summer on the walk home, I was creating new things that mattered, new associations that mean something now.

These days, when I make the trek from campus to friends’ apartments or houses, I think about quinnie’s songs like “in heaven all the first kisses last much longer than a night.” I think about the post-work quick turnaround to go to a Scubs game or a pregame or maybe just Brother’s or The Backer. I think about getting very very bad news this past summer and having to keep my head up, tears streaming down my face on Courtney Lane.

That very very bad news felt like forever, didn’t it? It always does. And I’m glad it wasn’t.

But I have to let myself stop being so attached to forever, even in its good forms. Of course, I wish it cost $5.99 to make the good things last forever — the first kisses, the friendships, the spiciest margs of my life. 

But nothing lasts forever, and that’s actually a very good thing.