playground buddies

Audrey Nguyen

i’m eating strawberry cheerios, even though it's 10 pm and the coldest part of october. i have a science test tomorrow and a breakup to attend to around noon, but i’ll sit here for however much longer, swirling the pink into leftover milk and the minutes into delirium. all this to say i’m thinking of you. i can’t quite explain why, at least not in a way that’s profound. if you want some metaphorical shit, i guess we’re like breakfast food in the middle of the night, a dynamic that surprisingly hits the spot. considering you’re a white baseball boy and i’m an asian theatre girl and those social circles typically don’t mix in suburbia, i don’t know. let’s just say i never would’ve expected us to get along the way we do.

anyway, the simpler reason for you popping up in my brain was that the cereal binge reminded me of our facetime yesterday. as per usual, you called me at some random, extremely inconvenient time just to say that you discovered rice krispies and ice cream are the perfect combination and that i will have no choice but to try it the next time i’m at your house. it was so incredibly stupid, but in a world dying from party politics and the climate crisis, i think i needed something stupid. like how you send pics of your dino poop from the museum or play me songs you’ve been listening to lately when i don’t seem like myself. or how you turn to me for girl advice and we take 30 minutes deciding how you’ll ask for her number.

don’t get me wrong. i still very much need friends who i can get down into the nitty-gritty with and spend hours on the phone trauma dumping to. it’s therapeutic to surround yourself with people who understand your problems at the deepest level. but sometimes i’m tired of having to care about things adults are supposed to handle. we’re only 15, after all. it’s a recipe for burnout, always keeping up with cancel culture and turning every lunch break into a diplomatic debate.

but you know what we remind me of? those kids who are suddenly best friends because they have the same sparkly sneakers. those kids who, for those few hours during mom’s tennis lesson, got their feet dangling from rusty swings and make believe pirates on jungle gyms. and maybe they’ll forget each other in a day or two, like we might in a couple years once i graduate, but i’m okay with the now and only now friendship. so i guess i just wanted to say thanks for hanging out with me on the playground and bonding over cereal.