Olivia and Liam of Phikahitch

In the winter of 2011, I met my best friends. I first saw Olivia dragging her six-foot tall stuffed sidekick, Dr. Welly, inside an igloo made by the “big kids,” who lived on the other side of the mountain. I was introduced to Liam on a trampoline, where he proceeded to throw a ball of ice at my head, causing a significant amount of swelling on the right side of my face for days. But that wasn’t the worst injury of the day, as he proceeded to break his arm a mere minutes later. 

“Who were those twins?” My parents skeptically asked, on our way to the car. In the back seat, holding an ice pack in one hand and a stick in the other, which I was using to make beats with on the fragile window, I thought more about my parents’ question. Who were those twins?

Months later, another play date had been scheduled for myself, Olivia, and Liam. On the ride there, my mom told me that if anything happened, she’d only be upstairs with their mom and I could go up there to get her. In my mind, I knew I wasn’t no wimp. I was, after all, the kid who terrorized First Step Daycare of Woodstock, and my subsequent expulsion may well have been the reason we relocated to Garrison, New York, in the first place. I knew I could hold my own, and how dare she question my ability to do so. 

When I arrived at Olivia and Liam’s house my confidence was quickly shaken by 120 minutes of the most intense overland passage ever undertaken by a force of three elementary schoolers. The trail brought us over mountains, through valleys, and around a quicksand patch. Around the second hour, while climbing over a prickle bush, a body of water caught my attention. Liam violently hit the bushes with his stick he claimed was a sword, and eventually we had arrived at a small beach sitting next to a 30-foot by 30-foot pond.

 Immediately we all dispersed to the three islands on the pond, claiming each for our own. Olivia deemed the lands to be called Phikahitch, which when we questioned her on the meaning, she said “means nothing at all. It is just a name.” My island, “North-South-West-East Leoland,” immediately became the banking capital of our colony and the backbone of the Phikaitchean economy. 

Within the walls of the treasury, was a stockpile of hundreds of the largest acorns, with caps attached. A capless acorn was worthless, while a large-capped acorn was a valuable commodity which could be exchanged for labor or anything else cool we found in the surrounding forests. 

Liam’s island was the center of construction. Olivia and I would pay Liam 30 of our largest capped acorns to complete projects on our land. Olivia’s island served as the administrative capital; she’d create laws, and she had three brick buildings and one large wooden pole serving little purpose aside from existing. That night, back at the house, we all played Minecraft, while Olivia and I cuddled up under our blanket fort and Liam opted to sit on the couch. By this point in the sleepover, I knew these were the people for me.

Over the next summers, we continued having play dates by Phikahitch. We even expanded our empire into other areas, such as Hitpex (silent t) National Park behind my house, containing Olivia, Liam, and Leo Mountains. One day, Olivia and I teamed up and decided to push Liam into the ice-cold pond in the middle of January. 

We were in big trouble with the parents, but we didn’t care – we were always in trouble. What hurt more was that Liam stopped hanging out with us. We didn’t mean to be bad friends to Liam. We were simply two non-medicated kids with free spirits and the type of ADHD that if everyone had it, would lead to an immediate and complete societal collapse. Olivia and I kept up with Phikahitch, but there was an empty sensation in the air. This moment was one of the first times in my life I felt it. The feeling overwhelmed me. All the projects we planned together no longer excited me. 

One day, I woke up and it was all different. The idea of playing in Phikahitch seemed empty. That day, I didn’t walk over to Olivia and Liam's house, and, when around midday Olivia walked to my house, I ran into the woods to pretend I wasn’t home. Later that day, when I knew Olivia was at ballet, I went over to their house to see Liam. We talked about girls and played video games while listening to 21 Savage’s first album, which to our simple little minds was the peak of “modern culture.”

The empty feelings about Phikahitch were gone, making way for the new, somewhat full feelings of talking about girls, listening to music, and hanging with an old friend. Phikahitch’s feeling of emptiness also opened our minds for the first time to a mutual understanding and care for each other's perceptions of us. We didn’t want to be seen playing in Phikahitch anymore, so we didn’t. We weren’t kids anymore.

Nowadays, I rarely come to Phikahitch. But when I do, I feel a little shimmer of something deep down calling me to it, the memory of how things here used to feel. As time went on, and the more I lost my childhood incomprehension from the shelter of my upbringing in the mountains, the more I lost this feeling of fullness: The perpetual illness that kids call getting older, and that parents call getting growing up.