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“You haven’t been yourself lately.” Tori was sitting in the sand beside me. She had driven us out to the ocean in her old beat up truck. She was right. She was always right. What are friends for, if not to be right.

I had been restless lately. I’m not sure exactly why. Or maybe I knew, but I didn’t want to know. Or maybe it was the moon. The weather. The alignment of the planets. The girl. It didn’t really matter why, or maybe it did, but I obsessed about it all the same. All that I knew was this restless feeling deep inside my soul.

I was sitting with my knees hugged up toward my chest, my left arm draped around the front keeping me in a sitting semi-fetal position. I rested my chin on my knees and sifted sand through my right hand. Pouring the soft grains out like a hourglass. Watching time slowly tick away.

Tori looked back toward the ocean. “It’s ok. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

I could see her out of the corner of my eye. Sitting there, eyes fixated on the waves crashing before us. Faded black Converse one stars, baggy black ’skater’ shorts, a white t-shirt with black bold lettering across the chest “For Official Use Only”, and a black ballcap with an Anarchy symbol turned backward covering her short blonde spikey hair.

I wanted to tell her everything. Expalin this restlessness, but I didn’t know where to start. We’d been friends for so long it didn’t really matter if I said anything at all. She knew. She could feel it. She’d seen it before. She just waited, knowing I would find my voice.

“Ya know,” I started. “I come out here when I need to clean out my head. Get rid of all the clutter.”

She nodded and waited.

“I’ve just felt so trapped by everything lately. I’m in this pathetic rutt.”

She raised her eyebrows as she turned to look my way. “Does the girl know you feel this way?”

I sighed and avoided her eyes by looking back down at the sand. “Yep, but we don’t talk about it much. Whenever I bring it up she tells me I’m just making shit up. That I need to buckle down, grow up. Stop all the daydreaming, the writing. Quit the coffee house job and get a ‘real’ one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tori had that annoyed look on her face. She never really like the girl in the first place.

“A job that you have to dress up for. One where t-shirts, shorts, and ballcaps aren’t allowed. I dunno. Maybe I’m making things bigger than they really are. It’s not like the coffee house is the greatest gig in the world. Maybe I’m just taking all she’s saying out of context. Tor, I just don’t know anymore.”

Tori’s eyes softened as she listened to me ramble on. “I’m not going to tell you what you need to do. You know in your soul what you need.”

“It’s like this wicked trip. When you’re single you want a relationship. When you’re in a relationship you think things would be better if you were single. What the fuck? Can’t there be any balance?”

Tori shrugged her shoulders. “Girl, all I gotta say is. . . ‘Is this the relationship you want? Living with someone else’s idea of what being grown up is?’”

I inhaled deeply through my nostrils. The musky scent of the salty sea air filling my lungs. I could feel it swirl around before I exhaled out my mouth. “Tor, have you ever loved someone so much you know the love has to be right, but then you look around and notice that the time isn’t right. Time is making things all out of sync and there just isn’t any balance no matter how much you love.” I ran my fingers through my hair. I could feel bits of sand on my forehead, but I didn’t feel like brushing them away. “I don’t know if I’m making any sense. It’s like the right love. The right person. But the wrong time.”

She nodded. “I hate to sound like the cliche, but timing is everything. It’s true. It’s why cliche’s suck.” She shook her head slowly. “But that’s not the whole picture, is this relationship the kinda ‘grown up’ you want? Timing or no timing.”

“I dunno Tor. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I need more structure. Maybe my writing is only a ‘hobby’. It’s not like I get paid for the stuff I do. Maybe all these dreams are clouding my true vision of what needs to be. . . of finding the real. Maybe I do need to ‘just grow up’.”

Tori cocked her head to the side, one eyebrow raised, in a sarcastic tone only she had mastered. “Is that so? You really feel that way?”

“Naw. I don’t. If being grown up means stop being a dreamer. I don’t ever want to grow up.” I looked into her cool blue eyes and felt the warmth of her soul. “I just want this to all work out ya know.”

She smiled softly. “It always does.”

I rested my chin back down on my knees. Salty mist tickling my cheeks, I whispered. “I’ll never grow up.”

Tori placed her hand on my shoulder and gently squeezed.

by paid_voyeur