Happy Friday

Yay, it's Friday, happiest of days!

Or is it?

For some reason, yesterday I got to thinking about how glad I was that I was just one day away from Friday, when it would be the weekend and I could get down with my bad self, hang with the family and generally get away from work. Then, for some reason, I thought of the people for which Friday represented the end of something wonderful and not the end of a week spent in drudgery and toil.

It's summer time now, which means summer vacations and exotic trips and times spent at camp. Right now there are people who are having the best week of their lives, as they spend their time frolicking on exotic beaches and eating fantastic dishes paired with refreshing drinks. These people have never been so relaxed and free as they did this past week.

Or there's a woman who went on a trip, not meaning to do anything but spend time with herself and she happened to meet someone, someone who stirs in her feelings she never knew she had. She lives away, far away from this someone, far enough to make it unreasonable to have more time with this person exist outside of this bubble of paradise she has managed to find herself in.

Or there's a boy who went to camp, not wanting to at all, lonely and depressed when he arrived, because he couldn't compete with at the athletic events, nor did he really want to. He planned on a week of misery until he saw her, and her shy smile told him that she felt the same way about her surroundings as he did. When they finally kissed, each sharing their first with each other, under the late week evening's swollen moon, he hoped that he would remember this moment for all of his life, how her lips were so soft and how her hair smelled like strawberries.

For these people, Friday represents and ending to something they will never get back, never be able to extend, never be able to recapture. The very fact that their experiences were finite, and that they knew of this limitation, even when they desperately tried to forget about it, made their weeks so much sweeter yet makes today so much more painful.

We'll always have the pictures, they'll think. There will be other vacations! We'll go on one every year! And they will, but no matter how good a time they'll have, it will never be as good as this time, and it will sit there, in their hearts, gnawing away at their good times.

We can write, we can call! We'll see each other! But they won't. Geography and time and lives and the real world get in the way to when you can't remember exactly what it was about the other person that got you so excited. If you do meet, you'll desperately hope to recapture what you felt during that blissful week, but it is lost, gone into the ether.

We can call, our parents will take us to visit each other! But they won't. They don't remember what it's like to be 13, when everything seemed to be life or death, when love was uncluttered with adult responsibilities and diminished by the passing of time and the eventual familiarity of decades with the same person.

To these people, I say hold on to this week. Hold it in your heart and guard it and keep it precious. You may never relive it, or return to it, but you can never lose it. It will stay with you even when the details are somewhat fuzzy and you can't remember which place you went on what day, or the exact color of his eyes, or where she said she went to school. At that point, it will have become something else to you, possibly even bested by some greater event you experience, but it will be no less comforting, no less wondrous, no less stirring.

To the rest of you, I say, Happy Friday. Drinks are on me. This is some depressing shit.