Not like lint brushing your car or tying a red ribbon around your suitcase. I mean, like to be a photographer or writer so that you can capture memories you won’t otherwise remember. Another life hack is to republish old writing – not only because you have something to say but have already said it better – but because it makes you remember captured memories you wouldn’t otherwise have remembered. Even if it wasn’t that long ago. I’ve always thought you can almost touch memories.

I’ve even written a short story about that one summer, the second best of my life, and read it aloud to my Creative Writing class. What bravery! I had a major crush on a poet named Kyle in my class and he found me in the dining hall after class, touched my arm and said, “Your story. Pizza Dreams. It hit me.. right here. In the heart.” Then he put his hand on his heart, put his hands in his pockets, and ambled away. This is pretty much the crushiest thing you can do to a girl like me.

Let’s start at the beginning. I celebrated New Year’s 2000 when I was 19, and I was petrified. Somehow, I found myself invited to a fancy dinner party so I dressed up, grabbed my boyfriend, and partied all night. I may or may not have gotten slight food poisoning by something that night, and I was embarrassed to tell him. Eventually he asked me why I kept running away the next morning and I told him why and he laughed. “You think THAT is going to make me love you less?” Feeling much better later that night, on this day after the clock struck 2000, I went to visit the family I had babysat for ten years, and we had a wicked Mario Kart marathon. I got dizzy – from food poisoning dehydration, or maybe from trying to wrap my brain around it all – the year 2000 and my place in it. The world and the world’s computers didn’t break after all.

The second best summer of my life was the summer I turned 20, halfway in. The summer I turned 19 was my first summer with a boyfriend, and that was where the hormones really came in. Life sort of hinged on summer nights and the best ways to get him alone, which was challenging since we both lived with our parents that summer. Then school started and I had a seriously insane roommate who talked to her stuffed animals and didn’t sleep, and the college dorms had these creepy, sketchy underground tunnels full of abandoned rooms with couches. I was one of the sketchy people using those tunnels.

The summer I said goodbye to 19 was the second best summer of my life. We went to Orlando in July and hit every theme park in 100 degrees. I remember sitting in the front row of the splash deck at SeaWorld and just putting out my arms and thinking, “Shamu, give it your best shot.” Getting soaked by an orca whale felt quite good, and then later I found the perfect studded hemp necklace for my boyfriend at a street vendor near Universal Studios. Little did I know then that my boyfriend would lose that necklace and be heartbroken, and then several years later I’d find myself back at that same street vendor near Universal Studios and I’d find the same hidden necklace. And I’d wonder about the appropriateness of sealing it in an envelope with a letter that would say, “It was clearly meant for you to have.” And that we’d almost get back together, for that or many other reasons, but maybe.. clearly we weren’t each other’s to have. That would be all right too.

My sister and mom got lost in an alligator-filled river later that week, and I waved to Duran Duran in a record store. I came home to my ridiculously awesome pizza delivering job which contributed to the second best summer of my life. Truly, the stories that fill that summer deserve 17 posts of their own, but let’s just say I had a crush on the short order cook. It was all very innocent, back then, and little did I know that the summer would end and that my car would explode on the side of Route 287, and that I’d fall for my best guy friend. My first love would survive the short order cook, but not the guy friend..

This is the life hack. This is why we write, and this is why we take pictures. Only a few years in of kid wrangling and career building and it’s almost just a faint spark, but I can bring it all back in an instant, and it’s like it never left at all, did it?

Today’s Finish the Sentence Friday topic is “My favorite life hack is…” and there’s still time to write yours. Come link up if you have a spin on that great topic – and I hope it’s about lint brushing your car or tying ribbons on luggage: HERE.