[unabashedly uncorked: your daily dose of EPH]

do you all remember the day your childhood officially ended and you became an adult? 

my day was 8 years ago today. it began like any ordinary tuesday… class all day and laying in the sun enjoying the springtime in wilmington. i was starting to stress about exams but was looking so forward to moving home and spending the summer with my high school friends. 

word got to me that afternoon. one of my great friends had been in an accident in raleigh. i wish i could say that i dropped everything and hauled ass up 1-40 but being young and naive, i believed that he would be okay.

i was wrong. the doctors kept him on life support just long enough for his family to make it to his side. he died that night, eight years ago today. i didn’t make it in time to say good-bye.

he was the laughter of the group. he was the raw sense of humor that always made you laugh, he was the friend that dropped everything to escort you to homecoming, and he was the silly friend that your mom sent breakfast to in spanish class. 

i sat outside to talk to him today. i told him i was getting married and how i wished he knew blake. i told him how proud he would be of his two beautiful sisters, how much my brother had grown up, and how much i missed him. i laughed at the idea that he was probably watching me shower every morning from the corner of his cloud in heaven.

his memory lives on in all of us, in the stories we will tell our children, and the lessons we have taught to anyone that will listen. 

please, in his honor, always remember to buckle-up.