so we can stay like this forever

(title from Soco Amaretto Lime by Brand New)

Homemade mac n’ cheese tastes
like honeysuckle nectar when you’re
sixteen and your friend has found the key
to her parents’ liquor cabinet. “My mom’s
an alcoholic anyway,” your friend shrugs
as she flicks the cap off a bottle of Grey Goose
and passes it over to you. “We’re doing her
a favor when you think about it.”

You’re sixteen. You’re sixteen and last year
two of your best friends died but this isn’t last
year; you’re here, and this mac n’ cheese is
the best thing you’ve ever fucking tasted,
and one of your friends is playing “Cigarette
Daydreams” on guitar, and you’re all singing;
looking for the answers in the pouring rain,
that’s what Cage the Elephant said,
right?

Well, you and your friends have found
the answers, and they’re not in the rain,
they’re right here in this communal bowl
of mac n’ cheese, and you’re not sure who
says it—the vodka bottle is empty now—
but one of you says it: “I wish we could stay
like this forever.”

And you promise each other that you will,
that you’ll stay like this forever, because
you’re all sixteen and none of you know yet how
quickly people will burst in and out of your lives (how
could you possibly know?) But there is magic
in a promise, especially one made over a bowl
of Kraft mac n’ cheese, sworn on like a bible,

but you don’t swear that you believe in
a god; who cares about that when you feel like this,
like you’ll never forget what it feels like
to be sixteen, like there’s no such thing as
graduation or college or unfriending people
on Facebook or endings without closure. You
don’t swear that you believe in a god. You swear

that you and your friends are invincible,
that if the five of you jumped off the roof
of the abandoned building you sit on sometimes
while you stargaze, you wouldn’t die;
instead you’d get engulfed in the night
and become fucking stars because the light
that’s shooting out of you and your friends
is that goddamn bright.

You swear this, that you believe you’re all
invincible, even though you know that you’re
not, even though you’ve been shown that you’re
not (two times, by a swing set and a car crash), even
still, you would draw your sword in an instant
if anyone suggested that you and your friends
were anything but bulletproof, and the best part is

your opponent wouldn’t be able to scratch you,
wouldn’t be able to do a goddamn thing, because
you’re goddamn indestructible. In this moment,
this is the truth, you’re sure of it: you and your
friends will never age, will never leave this basement,
will never leave this moment,
will never leave each other.

A few years after this night, this night
that you still think about with a sort of reverence,
like a prayer, Jesse Lacey, the singer of
the band that you and your friends viewed as holy
when you were sixteen, played a song in concert
that he had written as a teenager,
a song that had the lyric “I’m gonna stay
eighteen forever, so we can stay like this
forever.”

Before Jesse sang the song, he prefaced
it with a statement: “This is a song I don’t
believe in anymore.”

For a while, you agreed with him. You thought
back to the communal bowl of mac n’ cheese,
to the feeling of invincibility, and you thought
about how naive you were at sixteen,
how stupid.

But you’re twenty-one now. And you’re tired
of the angsty belief that the best years of your life
are behind you. Jesse Lacey was wrong. He was so
wrong. Because you’ve caught glimpses of the future:
you’ve heard it in the sound of your girlfriend’s
laugh, you’ve seen it when your best friend
passed her chemistry final with an A fucking plus,

and you’ve tasted it. The future tastes like
a bowl of homemade mac n’ cheese
in your high school best friend’s basement.
Dig your fork in. Take a bite. Do you taste it?
Do you?
Honeysuckle nectar.

Rachel Richmond is a senior at Hollins University majoring in English. She is an editor for Gravel magazine, and spends her time writing and spending time with her dogs. Her work has been seen in American High School Poets: Just Poetry anthology, as well as a Hollins University anthology about mental health. She writes as a form of healing, as well as as a passion.