Youthfulness is no secret to me. Not simply because I am young, but because I grew up in a world where my birthday fell at the very end of the kindergarten cutoff. Still, I have always felt I matched my peers’ maturity and confidence. Even on the very first day of kindergarten, I asked another girl in my class, “Will you be my best friend?” But as I entered intermediate school, my extroverted personality slowly began to retreat inward, struggling to find the courage to come back out. I would not say it was difficult for me to make friends. Rather, it was difficult to stop myself from feeling like I was too much. Keeping friends became harder, but not understanding why people would drift out of my life was the hardest part of all.
In high school, those feelings never fully disappeared, though they no longer carried the same weight. A large part of that change did not come from the classrooms or hallways of school itself, but from the people I met through extracurriculars and the places I slowly began carving out for myself. During the second semester of my sophomore year, one of those places would end up meaning more to me than I ever expected.
After months of searching for a job, I was hired at Luna of Ada through my sister. At first, it was simply somewhere to work—another obligation added to my week. But over time, the restaurant became more than that. Somewhere between long shifts and conversations in passing, I found the kind of friendships I had spent years wishing for. There was something sincere in the way they treated me. I had always envied people who could say they had known their friends forever, but for the first time, I realized what matters is not how long I had known someone, but how deeply they understood me. Even if these friendships did not begin years ago, they are some of the first I can picture carrying with me long after high school ends.
There is a theory that when someone dies, they relive the best seven minutes of their life. And when I die, aside from my wedding day or getting my master’s degree, I think a portion of it would be random nights after work at Luna.
After exhausting shifts, my coworkers and I have a routine of driving to Scooper Ice Cream or McDonald’s in downtown Ada before sitting in someone’s driveway for hours. Most nights are just filled with retelling stories from our shifts or confiding in each other about our personal dramas. Still, those nights have become strangely important to me.
Growing up, I always thought close friendships were supposed to look permanent and effortless, like the kind of people who have known each other since kindergarten and somehow never drifted apart. Because of that, I spent years thinking every friendship in my life was temporary before it even had the chance to become anything meaningful. But somewhere between late-night ice cream runs and sitting in dimly lit driveways long after midnight, I stopped thinking so hard about whether people would stay in my life and started appreciating the fact that, at least in those moments, they wanted me there.
