driving

my dad has a new house. and oh, it is beautiful
and gigantic
and bustling with dirt streaked construction workers
and barefoot little girls
and smart mouthed high schoolers
and bikini wearing college freshman drinking diet cokes and watching their skin turn browner and browner. laying on their backs on a smooth wooden dock. legs dangling in the man-made lake thats full of oversized bass and carp and a million other mysteries my boyfriend tried to catch on a pole for three hours last week. that freckly skin i love so much turned cherry red and burned against his blue armani shirt we bought for half price in new york. oh well, his eyes are still the same dark brown i lost myself in last summer.
today i drove to panera and ate salad for the first time. well, i didn't drive. these seventeen year old fingers have yet to grip a steering wheel and take a hold of all the freedom that a liscence brings. i am happy being stuck in the front seat, hand out the window and wind in my hair. I'm not in control, but I'm completely blissful. my 14 year old sister is already looking at cars, jeeps and lexus's and oh she is in such a hurry to grow up but she has no idea how beautiful she is. this will be her second year of high school and i watch her and the "Core Four" lounge by the neighborhood pool and giggle and share secrets. they think that it will last forever, how do i tell them that by graduation they may not even speak to eachother? that one may be pregnant, another an addict, another valedictorian? how do i tell them the world changes and so do the people in it, how do i remind them to love eachother regaurdless of who they all become? thats something i've learned recently. the people i used to devote my heart to somehow slipped right through my fingers. forgotten friends and broken promises and high school dances just passed us by and we speeded over them and called them bumps in the road but i don't want my friendships to be just another speed bump. i want to take my life by the wheel and drive on and keep all those forgotten loves in my car, fill up every seat with the people i have neglected or hurt. fill it up with the friendships of my childhood, the bonds that never break no matter how different the paths we drive down may be. i want to floor that car towards a future where we can all remember that this is LIFE,
and we are in it together.