rare. |a.k.|

one|okay?

Fresh air. Warm, June sun. Slight breeze. Emma shouting. Oh God.

Don't get me wrong, I love my best friend, but sometimes she doesn't know when to just be quiet. I could be standing in my kitchen, drinking coffee and enjoying silence and she has to break it. She doesn't like being muted at all. But it's okay today, because we both have exciting places to be.

Emma and I were born and raised in Austin, Texas. Yesterday we drove two and a half hours down to Houston for completely different reasons. But, because we happened to need to be here around the same time, we just carpooled. Em is here to accept a job offer, and I'm here for a music festival.

Emma and I, although best friends, are very different people. On Friday nights when we were in school, I used to go for midnight drives with my boyfriend and take Polaroid pictures of the sunrise from our overnight stay into the Fairmount Austin hotel. Emma used to be sitting at home either sleeping or studying business school stuff. That's not to say we never hung out or anything, Emma and I have had our share of high-school stereotypical summer nights. Having parents that either don't care or trust you enough to do whatever while living in a town that's generally nice, growing up wasn't too difficult.

But being grown up is the hard part. My boyfriend, Sebastian Brown, is in college on a soccer scholarship, and my best friend is accepting a job at a big business here in Houston. Seb and Em were the only two people who kept me sane for 7 years straight and now they're both going to be gone. Em is going to be up to her neck in work, and Sebastian and I... our relationship is going downhill, fast. Long distance and my mistrust of him are not doing many favors. I remember telling Emma who I was dating, and what she said will stick with me until Seb and I end things.

"Sebastian Brown is notorious for leaving girls in lonely, vulnerable mental states."

I haven't been doing incredible in my mental health recently, so I find myself turning to music. Because of this, I've met a girl through Twitter named Jessie and that's who I'm attending Warped Tour with. She's become one of my best friends and I couldn't be happier. She said her brother actually works as a groundskeeper and apparently knows a dude in a band called As It Is and is gonna have us stick around them for a while?

As I looked through the 2016 Warped Tour lineup, I got dressed in my outfit which basically consisted of black, ripped up skinny jeans, my "Vote for Pedro" t-shirt and some red converse because everyone knows to not wear open-toed shoes. Believe me, you will break your toes and/or rip your toenails off. After I did my makeup, I checked everything off my list of things to grab and headed out to where Jessie was supposed to meet me, which was a little coffee shop called Boomtown. As I walked in, I looked the the girl with the long silver hair, who was most definitely wearing a cropped tank-top because she decided one night while high as a kite on FaceTime with me to cut all of her shirts in half.

"Charlie, over here!" I hear a long needed and sweet voice call out to me from the far right corner of the shop. I walked over to see Jess in white shorts, purple knee-high converse and, sure enough, a copped Beatles spaghetti strap tank-top.

"Oh my God, hi!" I say as I get back to the corner, Jessie standing up so I can hug her instead of that awkward choke-hold thing you do when you're trying to hug someone sitting down.

"You look amazing, how have you been!" I say, admiring how well her makeup complimented her shoes.

"Thank you! I've been doing amazing, how about you! How's journalism?" She asks.

Right. I have a job, I'm not a lazy bum. Well, technically I am. I've wanted to be a journalist or author ever since I was little, and my first step to doing that is writing small articles for websites and newspapers from the comfort of my own home. I went to college for it, I have a major in journalism and a minor in photography, but the major is pretty much the only reason I got this job.