I’m gonna start by saying that I’ve had a really rough couple of weeks, and I started writing this article about four times this week.
I really feel like everything I write is somehow tied to my mood, and since my mood decided to take a little vacation without me, my inspiration packed its bags and left too.
I say inspiration not because I like to invent things — although some of my stories do sound like something straight out of a movie — but because expressing myself when I’m feeling down has never really been my thing.
Except for my best friend, nobody truly knows what’s going on inside my head. And that’s okay. We all have bad days, bad weeks, and sometimes entire seasons when nothing seems to go the way we planned. We just hope those weeks don’t turn into months.
So, moving on.
Whenever I’m having an existential crisis, I tend to look backwards. A lot.
It’s my own little way of reminding myself that maybe there’s no such thing as a bad life. Maybe sometimes, we’re just going through a bad period. And when the present feels a little too heavy, I revisit the past. My childhood, my teenage years, old friends, ex-lovers, and all the versions of myself I’ve been along the way.
I promised myself I’d write about all of it someday. The good, the bad, and the stories that might make a few people question my judgment.
But today, with the weather outside and my mind wandering wherever it pleases, I found myself thinking about my teenage years.
More specifically, 2016.
Yes, I know. 2016 is trending all over social media again. Everyone seems to be looking back at who they were ten years ago, digging through old pictures and romanticizing a time when life felt different.
But for me, 2016 was the year my curfew disappeared and the wild animal inside me was finally allowed to play with the other teenagers.
And trust me, she had a lot of energy to burn.
Let me make one thing very clear: we’re Romanian. We’re nothing if we don’t find a way to bend the rules, even when they’re supposed to be strict.
So, the curfew? No big deal.
It hadn’t stopped me from drinking during the day or having sex with the curtains closed. But being allowed to stay out ALL NIGHT with my best friends?
Now, that was a different story.
And it all started a little earlier, towards the end of 2015, when my best friend celebrated his sixteenth birthday.
We drank way too much, deliberately broke a few bottles, stole some glasses just so we could break those later, and somehow came to the conclusion that this was exactly how we wanted to spend our teenage years.
Looking back, that night was funny, awkward, and probably a nightmare for whoever had to clean up after us.
But it was also the beginning of what would become a long collection of my best friend’s drunken stories. Stories he would rarely remember the next morning, but that we would happily remind him of for years to come.
It was the first time we had that much fun together, and I think something changed that night.
We’d grown up together. Our parents were friends, so sleeping at each other’s houses was nothing new. We’d been doing it for years, and we already had plenty of memories together.
But in our minds, that was the year everything changed.
And maybe it did.
Fast-forward to September 2016.
I’d just gotten out of a relationship, and I had a ritual: whenever life got messy, I’d call my two best friends and announce that I was coming over.
They lived about forty minutes outside Bucharest, which meant that visiting them felt like escaping to another world.
My own little la vida loca.
I’d go to my best friend’s place, and we’d get ready to go out. Makeup, hair, outfits, the whole production. He’d tell us to meet at eight, which was adorable because he was never, and I mean NEVER, ready at eight.
My girl and I were known for getting ready faster than the boys. We were almost always the first ones there, waiting for everyone else while pretending we weren’t annoyed.
We were, obviously, annoyed.
But eventually, everyone would show up, the drinks would start flowing, and the night would begin.
And that was the beginning of a very fun autumn.
Because soon enough, going out together became a weekly tradition.
It was my first time clubbing with them, and although we drank roughly the same amount, my girl and I somehow always ended up being the responsible ones, carrying the boys home.
Which is a hilarious sentence to write, considering the circumstances.
Somewhere along the way, my guy best friend started drinking so much that he wouldn’t remember half of what had happened the night before.
And honestly? Telling him the next morning was almost as entertaining as the night itself.
But the thing is, the people we were partying with weren’t new to us.
We’d known them since school. We met them when we were in fifth grade, while they were already in seventh and eighth. Back then, they were the older kids. The ones who seemed a little cooler, a little more grown-up, and probably knew things we hadn’t even thought about yet.
We were children. They were teenagers. And none of us could have imagined that, years later, we’d be making some of our favourite memories together.
By 2016, we’d all grown up a little. We’d changed, made mistakes, developed our own personalities, and started figuring out who we wanted to be.
And somehow, we found ourselves in the same place again.
Only this time, we weren’t the kids meeting in the schoolyard. We were the ones going out together, staying up too late, drinking too much, flirting, laughing, and collecting stories we’d still be telling years later.
There was no official moment when we decided we were a group. We just kept showing up for one another, and eventually, that’s what we became.
I was the one who came and went from that group the most.
Not because the guys weren’t great, but because life kept happening. I got into relationships, and relationships usually came with restrictions, whether I wanted to admit it or not.
Time passed. People changed. We grew up.
But I kept my tradition.
Whenever I went through a breakup, whenever I was crying over something, whenever life became too much, or whenever I was simply being a crazy bitch who needed a night out, I knew who to call.
And my best friend was always there.
Waiting for me with a party, some advice — which was usually stupid, let’s be honest — or a joke that would somehow make everything feel a little less terrible.
He didn’t need to have the right answers. Sometimes, he just needed to be there.
And he was.
We made other friends along the way. We had other experiences, other relationships, and other chapters of our lives.
But that group from the village? It was always there in the background.
And, somehow, it still is.
Think about it. We met when we were children. We went through our teenage years together, survived questionable decisions and questionable hairstyles, and watched life take us in completely different directions.
Now some of us are married. Some have children. Some have moved on to completely different lives.
We’re no longer the teenagers who thought a night out could solve absolutely anything, who drank too much, laughed too loudly, and believed that growing up was something that happened to other people.
But we’re still here.
Maybe not together every weekend. Maybe not as often as we’d like. And definitely not with the same amount of free time we had back then.
But we’re here.
And there’s something beautiful about that.
We still have the memories.
The clubs. The barbecues. The flirting. The parties. The ridiculous stories that never get old, no matter how many times we tell them.
The kind of memories that make you laugh before you’ve even finished telling the story because everyone already knows what’s coming.
And I think that’s what I miss sometimes.
Not necessarily the clubs or the drinking. Not even being seventeen and believing I was old enough to understand the world.
I miss how easy it was to laugh.
How naturally happiness seemed to come to us. How we could spend an entire night doing absolutely nothing important and still wake up with a hundred stories to tell.
Back then, our problems felt enormous, but our lives were still ahead of us. We had no idea who we’d become, where we’d end up, or how much life would change us.
We didn’t know that some friendships would fade, that some people would become strangers, or that one day we’d look at old pictures and wonder how so much time had passed.
We were just there.
Living, laughing, making questionable decisions, and assuming there would always be another weekend, another party, another night when we’d all end up in the same place again.
And perhaps that’s what makes those memories so precious now.
Not because everything was perfect. It wasn’t. We were teenagers, after all. We made mistakes, hurt people, got hurt, and occasionally behaved like absolute idiots.
But we were happy in ways we didn’t even know how to appreciate yet.
Sometimes, when life gets difficult, I find myself wishing I could go back.
Not to change anything. Not to relive every decision or become the person I was back then.
Just to have one more night with those people, in that little corner of the world, when we were all together and the only thing we had to worry about was how we were getting home.
I’d give a lot for one more night like that.
But maybe nostalgia isn’t asking us to go back.
Maybe it’s just reminding us that we’ve been happy before. That we’ve laughed until our stomachs hurt, loved people who became part of our history, and lived through moments we didn’t realize we’d miss one day.
And if we’ve experienced that kind of happiness once, perhaps we can find it again.
It might look different. The people around us might change. We might not be able to stay out all night anymore without needing three business days to recover.
But maybe we can still find our people. Still laugh until we cry. Still make memories worth telling ten years later.
Because when I look at us now, I don’t just see a group of people who used to party together.
I see the kids we used to be, the teenagers we grew into, and the adults we’re still becoming.
I see everything we’ve been through, everything that’s changed, and all the things that somehow haven’t.
I see friendships that survived growing up, relationships, distance, responsibilities, and the simple fact that life doesn’t always leave us as much time for one another as we’d like.
And I think, we made it.
Not because we figured everything out. Not because life turned out exactly as we imagined it would.
But because, after all these years, we still have a piece of that time connecting us.
We’re still here, carrying the same memories, laughing at the same ridiculous stories, and remembering the people we were before life got so complicated.
Maybe we don’t need to be teenagers again.
Maybe we just need to remember what it felt like to be them.
And to the people who were there in 2016, who grew up with me, made those nights unforgettable, and somehow managed to stay in my life through all the years that followed:
Thank you.
For the chaos, the laughter, the questionable decisions, and the memories that still make me smile.
I hope life gives us another night like that someday.
Not because I want to go back to who we were, but because I’d love to see who we are now, all together again, making new memories we won’t fully appreciate until another ten years have passed.
Until then, I’ll keep the old ones.
And whenever life gets a little too heavy, I’ll remind myself that somewhere in my past, there’s a girl who laughed without thinking about tomorrow.
She had no idea what life had planned for her. She didn’t know which people would stay, which would leave, or how much growing up would change the way she saw the world.
But she had her people.
And, somehow, some of them are still here.
Maybe that’s what growing up is about. Not keeping everything the way it was, but looking back one day and realizing that, despite everything that changed, some of the best parts of your life never really left you.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.
Until next time 🤍
