I Don’t Remember My Last Day Playing Outside

“Peace guys, I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

I don’t remember my last day playing outside. I like to think that we ended with a shake of the hand and a few attaboys. But, the realist in me knows the way our games went, it most likely ended with someone mad at someone for some dirty play.

But, maybe it ended with a Mango Arizona from the local bodega. Maybe it ended with one of our porch talks where we’d profess our love for our high school sweethearts and solve the world’s problems from the comfort of our suburban privilege. Maybe it ended with my admittance of my fear of dying alone to Alex, Asef, and Chris and them reassuring me that it would never happen.

Or maybe it didn’t end.

Maybe it just faded away.

Many of us like to think we get a last for everything we hold dear in life. A last word with our parents before they pass. A last kiss with a forgotten lover who holds a piece of your heart and soul. A last party before we abandoned the youthful exuberance of college for the cold bleak suit for corporate america.

We like to think “lasts” are common, but life isn’t so clean. If we all had “lasts, like the climax from a movie, we’d hold every word with such high regard. We’d sip every drink with a slow loving tenderness. Rather than try to tear away and rush out for that party that Friday night, we’d hold our mothers longer.

But lasts aren’t common.

Fading away is.

We don’t have final conversations with friends. Careers, relationships, and time serve as rafts in open water, for us and our loved ones, slowly drifting away, while we marvel at the views. Unaware, we walk away from the homes that made us to build gilded cages of isolation, which we escape from only for a Thanksgiving or for an Eid or for a New Year’s. And just like that, we drift away.

I don’t remember the last time we played outside. I just remember we did it. I remember the laughs and I remember the bruises. I wonder if my friends remember it the way I do? Do you look back with joyful nostalgia or do you look back at a simpler time where happiness was not the mansion you pursued but the home that engulfed you?

My friend is getting married to the love of his life. When he texted me asking about whether I’d travel to the middle of the country for his wedding, his first words weren’t expected monotonous niceties. His first words were, “Remember those days after school where we’d immediately get a game going until it was time for the sunset?”

He had remembered.

Many of us don’t remember our last college party, our last time playing outside, our last time telling a friend we loved them. That’s okay. That’s life.

If I could go back to whenever that last time was, knowing that it was the last time, I wouldn’t change a thing. I wouldn’t want to stain the memory with my selfish need for closure. I bask in the glory of the normalcy and simplicity of just drifting away, like a leaf in brisk October air. I bask in the memory of laughs shared. I bask in the insults shared. I bask in the Arizona sipped. I smile because our last was so normal, so mundane compared to the lasts seen in movies. There was no big speech of how we had gotten old. There was no shared reminiscing of camaraderie. There was just insults, Arizona, and “fuck you’s”. It was so normal, and our normal was happy.

Don’t stress too much over your last. Make every moment amazing, so that when you look back, you don’t have to remember the last thing you said to someone, or the last kiss you had, or the last great drink you had. You can just live knowing that it was fucking great.

I don’t remember the last time I played outside with my friends. But I know, it was glorious, bruises and all.

For my guys who were at that last game, let’s run it back.