halloween haunts

don't be scared of growing up

“I swear that wall used to be taller.”

My friend had just taken a running jump to touch the top of the wallball wall, something I’ve watched him attempt again and again since we were small. He reaches it easily, and backs down disappointed; the challenge is no more. Because we have grown older, we have grown taller, and the wallball wall did not. It’s been there for as long as I’ve ever known my elementary school, but now the green paint faded more with age, and the asphalt has been polished smooth with the hundreds of little sneakers scuffing against it. 

Somehow, we had ended up back at elementary school during the final hours of trick-or-treating. Our feet had grown tired, our bags chock-filled with candy, and the familiar playground seemed to call us to playfully reminisce of the fun we used to have. The waning crescent lit them enough to know who each person was. But my friends’ faces are familiar, I have known them for so long they are engrained in me. 

We were frozen on that blacktop, both in temperature and in memory. In that elementary school, we were permitted to know who we have been individually, and who we have been together. I believe it’s been the greatest privilege to care for the friends I’ve known since I can remember knowing. We knew each other on Halloween night at our old school, in the words we had spoken and the thoughts left unsaid. 

I have watched them all grow, and I love them dearly for it. I don’t ask permission to be children together again, because remembering is somehow almost better. It gives you that pang in your heart that cannot be replicated. If we were young again, I would still care for them, but now that we are older together, I get to know them like never before. 

“Didn’t that fence used to be taller?”

We knew it was time for us to walk home, so we made our way out the gate and walked alongside the chain-link fence on the way to the main street. My first-grade best friend stares at it and comments.

“When did this all happen? When did we get older?”

My other friend decides to say this soon after. Were they not watching? I’ve tried my best to keep myself aware of the things changing. I’ve documented my life, our lives, into a pile of diaries and countless photos filling up my phone storage to the last megabyte. But I suppose it did happen so fast. Never did I imagine my friends and I would be one of those high schoolers who got to stay out late without parents, completely unsupervised on Halloween. I always knew it was something that happened, but to other people, not to me. I was meant to stay young forever. I suppose this is an odd thing to say when I still am in my youth, and I know I’ll reminisce of yesterday's Halloween the same I would years past now. But it’s true, my elementary school days seemed limitless, and my days of growing up would be far away.

Yet here they are, I’m growing up and it did happen so quickly. And soon, we will all be gone, forging our own lives however we please. I hope they always know that I love them, always and forever on the elementary school playground.