Do you ever wonder whenever something you do will be the last time you ever do it? 

Now, I don’t mean to sound grim - I’m not talking about death, where you’re all shriveled up and your muscles have finally gone out.

I’m talking about the many things that once defined your present. Perhaps the last time your online friend messaged you Goodnight, I’ll be back tomorrow, but the green dot next to their username never flickered up. The last time you saw that stray cat you were always fond of, lounging around in its usual spot until one day it vanished.

Perhaps the last time you glanced at your family home, where you spent your childhood in, now empty and bare. Maybe the last time you ever told your partner you loved them, before the relationship fell into shambles.  

Each a flickering memory, only defined by the term bittersweet. Life in all it’s goodness held you softly in its routines, the things you believed would always coexist with you. It’s almost frightening how you live each day merely hoping it would still be there. 

But such is the dreaded - however natural - farewells that turn inevitable with time. 

I’ve perched myself lazily in a bedroom only supported with the dimness of tacky fairylights strung across the walls, with a circle of faces as familiar as my own. We’re laughing about things no outsider can ever truly decipher, our hearts beating to the kick of our own drum. One of us is turning eighteen tomorrow. Two of us are leaving for college next week. 

“Promise to text us from time to time,” Margo teases. She had a habit of pulling my pigtails and shaving off her eyebrows in the second grade. Now she's going to a hair stylist school.

“I will,” I reply, unsure of how earnest my promise was. The boys were yelling at each other over a game they were playing, scrawled jargon filling up the room.

“You just got a license,” Simon groaned. He used to believe chainmail was real until our freshman year of highschool. We all used to send the most horrific ones to him just to get a laugh. Now he’s gotten accepted into a prestigious university on a full scholarship. “Why are you so bad at driving in a freaking video game?”

“It’s not the same, dude,” Laurie retorted, struggling to get the car on the screen to move in a straight line. All he ever wanted to be when he was younger was an astronaut. Now, he’s studying to take over his family business. “Hell, I’d even say driving an actual car is easier than this.”

“Ugh, you’re horrible.” 

It’s hard to believe this is the last time I’ll ever see them here, in my room, as if nothing was ever going to change. Tomorrow, there would be another test or school event, and they’d come gather here afterwards to watch a movie. The next day, we would walk slower after class to watch the sunset, then spend all nighters at study halls. But now they were too busy getting their documents ready, or having goodbye parties between relatives. 

I wonder where time had gone, and why as soon as we turned sixteen, our days shifted into some sort of hourglass. As if that free spirited adrenalin and carelessness only enraptured by fickle teenagers would disappear in an instant. You’re not a kid anymore, everyone would remind us. Act your age.

And you’re left wondering what it even meant to be our age, much less act like it. 

But then I inhale the sight of my friends, in all their fervent glee, where tomorrow is a forbidden word in our vocabulary. The drink that slips down my throat, cold and slippery, transforms into a temporary splurge of saccharine daydreams.

Margo waves her limbs to a song she loves on the speakers. She’s shown me this dance before. Simon and Laurie cease their argument to sing along, until all three of them are dancing on my stained carpet.

An indecipherable ache surges across my chest once they pull me into their little circle. These are my people, my youth - from all the sunsets we gleamed upon, the exams we struggled through together, the inside jokes we shared to the songs we knew by heart.

I wonder - when decades pull past, and my skin sags and wrinkles from age, won't these be the years I yearn to return to? 

There’s a last time for everything, and sometimes you don’t even realise until you finally say goodbye. Even this, whatever this is. 

Finally, my heartstrings tug at my lips, sweetened by the bubbled soda.  A wide toothed grin glosses over my cheeks as I let myself drown in their laughter. 

Goodbye, my youth.