happy birthday...aka growing up

my best friend's birthday is today. that means reminiscing and looking back at all of our memories.

john and I enjoying our time at the frogs (they're turtles) and compass

well here it is. my first blog post. I debated for a long time on what I wanted this to be about because when people read your blog post that’s their perception of you as a creator, a writer, a media persona, etc. (especially on your first one).

so in this blog I want to write about lessons. someone very special to me is celebrating their birthday today and I will not be celebrating with them because I am 6 hours away. but that’s just how life goes.

this person teaches me a lot about life and myself everyday. in high school I struggled a lot with figuring out who I was as a person, defining my values for myself with a constant lingering mindset of whether someone was judging me for it. but this person helped me. he taught me that I can’t live my life scared about what someone else thinks about me.

it was not until recently that I actually put this far fetched idea into reality. but i’ll get into that in a little bit. for now I want to go back to the past, I wanna talk about the first time I met john.

we’ve argued about this time after time, but the real first time I met john was at a butterfly park near my hometown. he was just saying hi to my mom (his long time best friend turned future wife) and my siblings and I were there to say hi to him for approximately ten minutes. I don’t remember much about this encounter except for the fact that I told him all about how I needed, let me exaggerate that again because I am dramatic, NEEDED the last book to the witch series I was currently reading but it was so expensive that we were going to try every single library that day to see if they had it. he was the most active listener my little 12 year old self had ever encountered. that was also the day I met my best friend.

flash forward a few years. my family was going on a walk in downtown batavia (not living there yet, just visiting my grandma). I, like every other teenager, was obsessed with taking unflattering pictures with too much winged eyeliner. but where’s the fun if not in that? so my siblings and i ran around, me in a floral skater dress that I remember feeling like hot shit in. we searched the bricks on the floor for my grandma and grandpa’s names and I took a million pictures of it and immediately made it my twitter header. we proceeded to take pictures on this big frog, thinking nothing of the people passing by or time flying by as we laughed at tiny, baby luke sitting on this huge frog.

flash forward another few years. my mom told me she was seeing someone. for some reason I felt devastated. here’s me really opening up now because in order for the story to make sense, I have to. I didn’t want my mom to move on with someone else. I wanted her to be mine. my sister’s. my brothers’. I didn’t want to see her hurting again so soon. men can be trash and I knew my precious mother deserved better than that. I also didn’t want a step dad. little did I know I still wouldn’t have an official step dad today, but that’s too technical at this point still. my mom told me first, being the oldest because I was the most important. all jokes, but it was important to ease us all into the process especially since my younger siblings barely understood what divorce was or why we had to move. so she offered to let me meet him and I reluctantly accepted, but only under the circumstances that he would buy me starbucks. little did he know that that would be the first cup of thousands that he would end up buying me.

so he bought me a coffee. I want to say that it was a caramel frappuccino, because 8th grade me didn’t like real coffee yet. I made a list of questions to ask him but when the time came I felt so little and I felt like there’s no way I could be as confident and outgoing as I thought I could have been. I went into that day imagining this man to be rude and for me to be the strong oldest sibling standing up for my mom and family, taking shots at this man. I thought this first interaction would be straight out of the parent trap with the evil step mom and I would have some amazing comeback or I would decide that this is not the person my mom fits with. but it definitely did not turn out like that. I actually liked john. we clicked. although I was shaking in my boots and my social anxiety was turned to high, I liked him. although every bone in my body wanted to hate him, I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him any of my questions until my mom prompted me to and I asked him what his favorite color was (blue) and whether he preferred one direction or five seconds of summer.

one day, I’m not even sure how this came up, we were talking about memories and going through pictures when we came back to the pictures of luke on the frog. john had also been telling us about how he used to walk around batavia when he came to see his parents, reminiscing in the town he grew up in. as we took a closer look at the photos, it coincidentally turned out that john was in the background of those pictures. strolling by, also in his own world. our worlds at that point had not collided and i think that the fact that he showed up in those pictures was fate. it’s a good reminder that people cross paths with us everyday who could be our future soulmate, best friend, enemy, lover, anything. and in that moment we have no idea. our fates had not yet collided because we were not supposed to meet at that point. john had recognized my mother and says he remembers thinking “wow what a cute family” before realizing that it was his best friend and her family, but didn’t want to intervene. it wasn’t his time to intervene. it wasn’t our time to cross paths, but that simple moment and photograph taken at the exact moment told us that we were supposed to meet later on and that that specific moment happened exactly as it was set up to be. so that we could laugh about it years later and think about how crazy it was that we had no idea who each other were four years ago.

john and I had a similar conversation a few weekends ago. he came up to visit me at his school turned mine Miami University. I often think that if I hadn’t had john in my life I would not have ended up at this perfect school for me. I would have never gained so much insight as to who I want to be, what I want to become, and most importantly someone to proofread my essays. john and I were sitting waiting for a table in our favorite little italian place on campus that he got us into after a miracle and dramatic performance. somehow he’s the only person that can make the impossible happen and he definitely should have been an actor. anyways, we talked about how four years ago we barely knew each other. I didn’t understand his humor as he didn’t understand a lot about me. but we grew together. I grew up and he grew into the father role he was always meant to play.

his step father bob played that father role in his life, and john had never been given the opportunity to be that father to anyone. then magically he decided to join my mom and our life and all of a sudden had four kids he couldn’t be more grateful for. before that dinner we talked about how grateful we are for the time and how time has moved so quickly. it feels as though just yesterday we moved to batavia or john moved in or we took a family vacation to florida or I committed to miami or my family watched me graduate. these moments are fleeting and they happen so quickly that the only thing we can do is sit back and enjoy them as they happen, which is definitely the biggest lesson john has ever taught me.

living in the moment. yes taking pictures (especially on an iPhone 11 thanks john) is great, but enjoying and capturing moments in our mind is even more special. I’ve never recorded a conversation that I had at a dinner with john or took a million pictures of our special experiences because they are locked into memory. I could share every single vivid memory I have with john on this blog post but I think I would be writing for a million years and some things are better to leave as memories. in french memories are called souvenirs because they are something that we take back home with us to bed and don’t ever want to get rid of no matter how small or cheap or expensive or weird or seemingly unimportant because we love every single one and cannot wait to fill our brains with more.

so thank you john. for teaching me how to be a better person, teaching me how to love myself, teaching me to love life, teaching me how to love the world, and most importantly teaching me how to be your best friend.

happy birthday buddy, let’s keep making memories <3

the iconic image