During my first (and unknowingly last) school trip as a high schooler, I became close with an upperclassmen who happened to be an older sibling of a classmate of mine. We didn’t necessarily not know each other, our school, from pre-school to twelfth grade consisted of a total of 130 kids, less than half of that belonging to the high school division, but the conditions we were dealing with in combination with the groups we were set up with, allowed for more intimate connections that wouldn’t necessarily have been made if we were on school grounds surrounded by our usual cliques. In any case, during one of our rides home, most everyone else had fallen asleep since we’d been helping construct a house for the minister’s mother since seven in the morning, and as we were sitting in the back seat having a conversation, he said something that has stuck with me ever since: “Sometimes it’s like you’re talking, not for the sake of talking, but for the sake of being heard.” There are moments like now, as a helicopter hovers over my apartment building, the clanking of pots and pans in nearby residences resound, and the spurting of sprinklers embedded within the grass, where I wonder if perhaps he wasn’t far from the truth.