ThatTime[WeThought]WeWereInvincible.docxVIP

Remember what it felt like to be invincible? That comforting, delusional feeling fueled by teenage hormones and stupidity that lulled you into believing that you and your friends would always exist? “Friends forever.” That’s what you wrote in yearbooks. Not “I hope we both make it to thirty.” Not “please don’t get cancer or drown yourself in a river.” When you were crammed into a fast-food booth dissolving into giggles fueled by sugary milkshakes and high-school gossip, you never paused to study your friends’ faces and wonder which ones would stay alive long enough to use “Facebook” as a verb. Life would stay like this forever, unbreakable and youthfully frozen in time. Sure, logically you accepted that time would happen and someday there would be babies and careers and gray hair and bills and dead friends. But it was a concept so far removed from your invincible bubble that it was barely worth contemplating?—?like the purpose of the quadratic formula you mindlessly memorized for a math test. Twenty seemed old. Thirty was so far away it might as well have been an urban legend. Like paying rent or buying health insurance. Then thirty does arrive, and not everyone is here anymore. That youthful bubble of invincibility was an illusion, just like they tried to tell you it would be. And suddenly you realize that forty is going to happen too?—?and fifty and sixty. And that’s only if you’re lucky. Because you weren’t invincible. You were lucky. And even if your luck continues until thirty-eight or ninety-two, along the way it will run out for others. Because not everyone can be lucky?—?that’s how luck works. Maybe a roommate steps off the curb at the wrong moment. Maybe one of those girls who used to giggle over milkshakes can’t overcome the random cruelty of her own brain. Maybe if one day your friend cries in that fast-food booth and confides that she’s considered taking a bottle full of pills, you should tell someone. Maybe that way you can avoid another childhood frien