We held time.

Right before senior year started, I bought a digital camera. I had no real plan, just this gut feeling that I wanted to document something. Maybe it was the sense that life was about to start moving fast, and I didn’t want to miss it. I figured I’d take photos, something artistic and light.

What I didn’t realize until after I opened the box was that the camera also recorded video. And once I started filming, I couldn’t stop.

It found its way to drumline.

Drumline wasn’t just an extracurricular. It was a heartbeat. A messy, loud, sleep-deprived family of kids who spent more time in the band hall than in their own homes. We bickered, we laughed until our ribs hurt, and we carried each other through every long practice and competition. So that’s what I started recording: all of it.

Somewhere along the way, the idea of a few clips turned into something bigger. I decided I’d make a full documentary. I set out to make a movie about us. About what it meant to belong to something that would eventually end but still leave its mark.

And by the end of senior year, I did just that. I poured everything I had into it. There were late nights editing, searching for the right songs, trying to capture the emotion inside each moment. I called it “We held time, we ran.” It was my dramatic teenage way of saying time stood still when we were together, and we took advantage of every minute of it.

When we gathered before graduation to watch it together, it felt like we were holding our own story in our hands. We laughed at old jokes, teared up at the goodbyes, and felt that rare magic of knowing you’re part of something you’ll never be able to recreate.

Then life happened. We graduated. Scattered. New cities, new jobs, new families. We all stayed loosely connected online, but that chapter became something we mostly talked about in past tense.

Until this past weekend.

We lost one of our own. One of the good ones. He was steady, hilarious, and the kind of person who could make a whole room lighter just by being in it. His passing took the wind out of all of us. There’s something about losing someone who shared a piece of your youth that hits different. It reminds you how fragile it all is, how time quietly carries us away from the moments we thought would last forever.

So about half of us came back together to honor him, to hold each other, to remember, and to watch the movie again.

I hadn’t seen it since the night we first watched it. I thought it was gone forever; I’d lost my copy years ago and I half-expected it to feel amateur. I thought it would just be some random clips set to emotional music… but when it started playing, I just sat there in awe.

It was storytelling. Real storytelling.

I could feel the heartbeat of who we were in every frame. The laughter, the exhaustion, the inside jokes, the growing pains… all of it was there. It was us. And I was proud. Proud that I’d captured something honest. Proud that, even as a kid, I understood how sacred ordinary moments could be.

Watching it now, with the same people who built those memories, felt like coming home. For a while, time stood still again. I wish every single one of the twenty people in that movie could have been there.

It reminded me that time doesn’t erase what’s real.
The love, the laughter, and the belonging still matters, even if the days that held them are long gone.

I wish I could’ve stayed with them all weekend and woken up Monday morning, walked back into the band hall, grabbed my drum, and played alongside everyone one more time.

But maybe that’s the beauty of it. Some moments aren’t meant to return. They’re meant to remind us how lucky we were to have lived them.

We held time once.
And in our own way, it’s still holding us.