I forgot the s’mores. My mom, who never buys me any junk food, had come home from the store one day with graham crackers, marshmallows, and Hershey’s chocolate bars so that I could make s’mores with my friends. But no one ever comes over to my house. I live too far away. I’m the one who’s always on the go, driving out to the town that all my friends live in, and I knew that it was futile to think I would be able to convince them to make the journey over to my side of the big city, just to roast some marshmallows.
When my mom offered to let me make them just for fun in our backyard, I patiently held-off, telling myself that they would taste so much better in good company. When I finally remembered to go into the pantry and grab the materials before heading out to a friend’s house, the gooey, melty goodness of s’mores was all I could think about during my drive over.
When I reached his house, I left the supplies on the porch table, only to discover that we didn’t have any wood for the fire pit. A few hours later, with hair that smelled like chlorine and hands occupied by a wet swimsuit and towel, I hugged my friends goodbye and got into my car.
I was halfway home on the freeway when I realized that I had left the s’mores behind, probably to spoil on his patio until someone noticed the misshapen bars of chocolate and melted-together marshmallows. The thought nearly broke my goddamn heart. I pictured my mom asking me how we all enjoyed the s’mores as soon as I got home, and I felt guilty. Should I lie to her and tell her they were great? Or tell her the truth and see her disappointment when she heard that her small gift to me had gone seemingly unappreciated, wasted?
The guilt was seeping into the forefront of my consciousness, and I thought of how I had asked her earlier in the day if I could take a trip to New York to visit some old friends who were very important to me. My mom didn’t understand why I just couldn’t stay at home and appreciate my current friends. She had no idea that the people I called whenever I felt myself falling apart at the seams weren’t the kids I went to school with, but the ones that now lived scattered across the globe. The ones, that once upon a time, I had seen every day for months as I lived away from home. Just because she had never met them, didn’t make them any less vital to me.
Inevitably, I began comparing my past friends to my current friends, and began sinking into a deep state of helplessness as I decided my current friends didn’t even know half of what I cherished most about who I was. I became convinced that only the old friends truly knew who I was in my entirety, or at least how I stood at eighteen years old. I felt like I had been contained, trapped for the past several months, living inside the shell of some shy teenage girl who couldn’t even tell a story without feeling like she was boring the room. My old friends had loved my stories. Now they were a part of my stories; characters that no one but me seemed to care about anymore.
Without warning, I began to cry. I just broke down sobbing in my mom’s minivan, trying to pull myself together before reaching my driveway. I was almost home now.
Upon hearing me enter the house, my parents called me into their room to ask me about how my night went. I plastered a fake smile on my face and hoped they would assume that my red eyes were just irritated from the chlorine in his pool. They noticed nothing wrong with me. The shell of a girl had succeeded in fooling even her own parents.
I sat alone in my living room, flipping through television channels but finding nothing worth watching, feeling crappy about myself, knowing I would never tell my current friends that I had cried on the way home, and really wishing I had s’mores to make me feel even the slightest bit better.
