I Miss The Days

I Miss The Days

Attalea Rose

 

I miss the days when we all were friends. The Eees. Katie, Amy, and me. Making purple and pink braided friendship bracelets on the playground, scouring thrift stores in high school to find our “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” pair of jeans and failing, and cheating off of one another’s calculus BC homework for our collective failing grades. If only Katie hadn’t left us, if only Amy hadn’t left me. 

Katie, with her excuses of being on her period during the week of swimming in gym classes and refusing to learn how to swim. Katie with her bloated, blue face when she fell off the dock at the lake and drowned before anyone realized she’d slipped away in the dark.

Amy, with her firm disbelief in seatbelts and firm belief in speeding. Amy with her new high scores, going 90 in a 55, 100 in a 55, 120 in a 55, 140 into a tree. 

I miss those days when we all were friends, the three musketeers facing bark chip-chucking classmates, facing militant teachers, facing an adulthood that I thought the Eees would face together, that I now have to face alone.

 

 

 

Woman smiles in front of a fence, has a short brown hair, glasses, wearing a yellow tank topAttalea Rose (she/her) is a fiction writer native to the Pacific Northwest, from the Midwest, and currently residing in the South where she is an undergraduate business student at the University of Alabama. Her short stories appear or are forthcoming in The Marr’s Field Journal, The Albion Review, Arachne Press’ Byways Anthology, and others. She was the contest winner of Periphery Journal’s 60th issue and the Bumbledeer Award winner of Audeamus Journal’s Issue XVI. Her debut novella, When the Flowers Breathe, was published by Red Rook Press in April 2023. She can be found on Instagram @attalearose.