I'm not a fan of Coke (I mean the drink but I'm not a fan of the drug either). I don't favor the idea of drinking something used as a cleaner or that can dissolve a nail in four days. If it can do it to nails, it can do it to my teeth and perhaps more importantly, my insides. Yet I love a new commercial for Coke that has just recently started airing.

I've only seen two commercials in my life that have had any sort of effect on me other than something along the lines of "mmm, that pizza looks tasty". Two have managed to pull an emotional string in my body. Both very recently. The first is a commercial that was aired during the Superbowl I believe (which I caught as a repeat later on as I do not watch football) about a young man who was ailing with a problem. A problem with which, if most of us had it, would consider our lives unlivable. Yet this man has a rich life. He is an artist; an artist I can only aspire to be. More importantly, he is thankful. He speaks at the end, as best he can; "I am unbelievably lucky". I don't even remember the product (like it was somehow still beer), but I remember every syllable that man spoke.

While the commercial I've just mentioned moved me, it didn't do so like the lesser Coke commercial did. And this is simply because I can't related to it as much as I can this one. A group of teenagers are running through a deserted subway station. As they run and make the train by seconds, the narrator (the voice of one of the teenagers) begins to speak about how he and his friends went to a concert together before graduation. On the way home, they boarded the train with no air. Hot and tired, they all drifted off as they rode towards their destination. All but one. The narrator sat, hair matted to his head by sweat, with a look of contentment on his face. He reflected, as the camera moved to show the faces of his sleeping friends and then back to his smile, that that had been the best day of his life and how he somewhat wished they all could have stayed on the train forever. Every time I see it my eyes begin to water.

The reason is simply that it makes me miss a specific time of my life. 1996 was most certainly the best time of my life (up until November and December, which became the two worst months of my life, leading up to the worst year of my life, 1997) and I get nostalgic just hearing the numbers. All the people I loved most in the world were together in one bunch that I saw all the time.

The main and most precious memory that comes to mind is waking up in the middle of the night, with Loba's hair all in my face which always caused a split-second of aggravation until I would breathe in the smell of it and realize whos it was. Stuffed in a pair on a couch not even meant for one at the home of my then-friend Garrett (as much as we don't care for each other now, I'd befriend him in a second to go back to that time), we all slept. I could hear the monstrous snores of my various friends that were laying about in all manner of positions across the room. Legs sticking every which way, mumbles in the form of poetry from the lips of the sleeping. It was winter yet always I slept with no blanket, snuggled in comfort in the radiating warmth of those people. I can't count the times I sat up, as best I could wedged in place as I was, with soft Loba hair tangled in my fingers looking at the faces of them all. As is common, it takes loss to reveal what was once had.

Of them all, I see one or two semi-regularly, two or three every so often, and the others not at all. And some, I ache to say, never again. As hard as I tried over these few years, which seem to have stretched to eternity, I didn't succeed in bringing some of them back into my life.

I could have stayed that way forever.

devolve | evolve