Last Day on Planet Earth

A few days ago, I played a game of tag. It's not something I do normally. My friends and I were just hanging out, chilling in the park while it was raining at about nine o'clock at night, and someone said what should we do now, so obviously my answer had to be let's play tag.

And chaos reigned.

What followed was one of the most horrifying experiences of my life. It was impossible to know who to trust. It was too dark to see down the entire field, so any tagging that went on over on the far end was unseen by those who hid behind the trees. Sometimes there were screams. You could see the vague outlines of people running from/towards each other, but for all I knew, my friends were being attacked by baby Rancors.

The worst was when the turned and ran towards you. It was impossible to tell if they were the villain or a fellow sufferer of our PG-rated slasher flick. That kid, the one who was running and screaming and laughing and having the greatest night for a very long time is the one that's sitting here, typing these words with childlike whimsy (I really just wanted to use the word whimsy, but I don't think that's still accurate after the Rancor reference).

But that kid isn't going to be there so much in the next coming weeks. In fact, he's gonna start fading away, like Ginny Weasley at the end of the second Harry Potter book (damn, I'm just piling on the nerd references). Eventually, he'll cease to exist, and something else will come up to take his place. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not really a sequel, it's a reboot, and not all reboots suck. I could end up becoming a better person. My tastes will probably change, and maybe I'll finally drop that obsessions with Joss Whedon and Ingrid Michaelson that I'm sure are unhealthy. I'm not really scared about any of that.

Over the past two or so weeks, I have said goodbye way too many times. Like, almost more times than I can count. In fact, one of my best friends was just over here a few minutes ago, and I guess she's what inspired this post. It made me think about what I'm going to be like the next time I come back here, how I'll be changed when I see her again. And that just made me worry about all of my other friends, how different I'll be then.

People change. That's a fact. But all through our public school days we were around each other, and as we changed our friends changed with us. We evolved into our friendships, making little adjustments here or there, making exceptions to rules when this one or that one picked up a habit that annoyed us, or standing by through a particularly disastrous romantic entanglement to ensure their safety. Sometimes we intervened, sometimes we fought, sometimes we lost friends. But for the most part we stayed in tact.

So what happens when we can't grow together, when we have to go at it alone for awhile. (Get your mind out of the gutter. Pervert.) In approximately seven hours, I will be leaving for a very long time. How much different will I be by then? Will our close-knit group even function together? How changed will we be?

Before I moved to the mountains, I had about two or three extremely close friends and a few people that I liked being around and talking to. I still talk to them from time to time, and--especially the close friends--I miss them. A lot sometimes. Now that I'm here, I have about 15 friends that I am going to severely miss and so many good friends that I'm sure that at least 5 of them have been in a movie with someone who was also in a movie with Kevin Bacon. That is a lot of connections to maintain, and I'm not sure the kid who keeps throwing out Rancor references is up to it.

It's kind of lucky, then, maybe, that this is that kid's last day on Earth. Starting tomorrow, he's going to start getting erased and redrawn. (Personally, I'm holding out hope that he'll be redrawn acne-free and with phoenix wings, but I'm willing to keep the acne in exchange for the wings.) Maybe the new kid'll be able to keep up the relationships, maybe he'll just get closer to his friends. Maybe he'll be happier. Maybe he'll be more himself, he'll fall in love, write a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, settle down. Maybe he'll write a screenplay that Joss Whedon decides to direct (seriously, unhealthy). Or maybe he'll get hit in the eyes by toxic waste tomorrow and he'll gain extrasensory abilities at the cost of his eyesight.

Either way, I'll be waiting on the edge of my seat to see how he ends up. I'll make the popcorn.