The Golden Years.

"I want to make a toast" she said standing in the middle of an extremely messy apartment. And as the six of us gathered around her, tripping over various articles of clothing and cracking open our first beers of the evening, there was no doubt that this one would be a real tear jerker. She began slowly, describing how much thinking she had done on the flight out to Denver and how much of it involved us girls. She listed the changes that had occurred in her life in the past two years and briefly touched on those changes that had occurred in the rest of ours, then concluded with a simple statement that really made the tears fall. "Through everything that has changed in our lives since we graduated, the one thing that has remained a constant, is our friendship".

The next morning after recapping the Nuggets game, more beers at my favorite dive bar and one too many rumple-mint shots, I sat in silence staring at my beautiful friends. As their conversation flowed from random make-outs to politics to travel plans and big dreams, I began remembering the toast from the night before, and lost myself in thought.

I remembered the first time I met each of them in college. Some, on the very first day in our sorority, others at random parties first semester freshman year, vying for both the attention and booze belonging to the football player of the week. We began our friendships over beer bongs and late nights on the beach, weary of each other's trust and probably unsure of our own loyalties as well. Through the years our friendships evolved and specific moments, breaking points if you will, brought us closer and cemented the bonds that had been forming over time. Whether it was on a beach while studying abroad, through the resolution of a major argument, or even an honest conversation at the nearest Starbucks, these moments left us in our rawest, realest state and it was in these moments that we let each other in. All the way in.

Then I recalled one of the last nights of college and another very important toast. Sitting around our dining room table with one bottle of champagne, a handful of pens and a sheet of paper for each of us. There we were intertwined in each other, sharing chairs, tickling arms, braiding hair, and practically reenacting the sleepover scene in Grease, minus the curlers. We wrote down our personal goals, we made predictions for the future, we answered questions and wrote notes to ourselves, then we bottled them up and put them away for safe keeping. And when it was all said and done we looked at each other through teary eyes and promised that in ten years we would re-open the bottle, during our golden years, while on a girls-only reunion trip somewhere tropical and warm. I so vividly remember the moment when the first person left the table that night. I didn't want it to end because I was scared that we would lose what we had in that moment, that we would lose each other to jobs, to boyfriends, to grad school, to life. I was scared that that second was as good as it would ever get for us and that the realness and rawness we felt, would fade in time.

Two years later, I found myself in my living room in Colorado staring at those same girls and feeling that same rawness. So much has changed, yet so much feels the exactly same. Through law school, job promotions, teacher of the year awards, stints abroad, parents divorces, parents re-marriages, the ownership of pets, the changing of boyfriends, and many many moves, the one thing that has truly remained the same in all our lives are our friendships with each other. Watching my friends lay together, playing with hair, tickling arms and making jokes that are far too inappropriate for anyone but our gross selves, I realized that our golden years are now and that they will continue for many years to come. That champagne bottle with our dreams in it continues to collect dust and will do so for the next eight years. But while we wait for the bottle to age, we will continue our reunions, our toasts, and our promises to remain close friends. Because as everything in life speeds by and changes us, the one constant that we can absolutely count on, is our friendship, and of course the never-ending inappropriate jokes.