It’s 10:31 pm and I’m a terrible writer but I had these thoughts in my head tonight so I wrote them down and tried to make them look nice and poetic I’m not sure how much sense this makes

Tonight I went to the river to watch the sunset with my friends. It was nothing special, we go often and the sunset wasn’t even particularly spectacular tonight. But something was different this time, something in me.

I was content.

I don’t remember the last time I was content. I don’t trust it, I don’t think it will last. But in that moment I sat on the rocks and pretended they weren’t littered with trash and that the river didn’t smell like gasoline and decay and contained flesh eating bacteria. I looked at the sunset on the water I grew up on, and I wished I could bottle a piece of the reflection on the water and bring it home with me. But I knew that under the dusky orange waves the water was toxic, that the fire in the water was just a reflection. I realized in that moment I was scared for whatever happens next, scared for me, scared for the friends who sat a few feet away from me, scared for our future. In that moment we were appreciating something together, sharing an experience.

Where will we be next year?

What will happen to the us that’s here now?

Will I even be the same person?

I’ll be 18 soon and my 18th year on earth has shaped me more than every other year, and I’m still changing, and it scares me.

Because it’s like the reflection tonight, to an outsider my life is average, there’s a quality to it (or to me?) that draws people to me (I think anyway haha) but right below it’s full of toxicity and pain.

But like how conservation groups are working to save the river, I’m working to save myself. I can just hope that in the next few years we’ll both be healthy again.