Waiting on a Lifetime

This is, I suppose, what I get for having cut myself off from old friends for so long.

I discovered today that I am an uncle. And have been for the past five years.

It's a strange feeling, made all the stranger by the circumstances surrounding my finding this out. Time is a funny thing for me, forever both constant and inconstant, always moving forward but finding strange ways to trap me in the past. But age, it seems, has a way of forcing the soul to let go of things that the psyche will not. It's not a mellowing, as some might put it but, perhaps, just an unwillingness to continue fighting old battles, long ago lost.

For whatever reason, as suddenly as I cut off contact, I've started to reconnect with old friends of mine, friends from my childhood. From a time that was simultaneously, paradoxically, both the best and the worst part of my life, for a variety of reasons.

I had lunch this afternoon with a man who, through those years and into my early adulthood, was more of a brother to me than the one I was born with. Some might find that to be a harsh judgment of the oldest son my parents produced, but there were, and are, reasons for that.

This man was, and is, my friend. Nothing will ever change that and, to this day, I would lay down my life for him. But it was a strange experience seeing him again; I looked at the man he had become in my absence, and yet I could still see faint images of the boy he was. Like seeing a ghost, forever young, or peering into a looking glass darkly.

But for that moment in time, I could see him as we once were, riding our bikes along the lakefront and down the streets of Chicago's Near North Side, and finding ways to, shall we say, creatively occupy our time without involving the Chicago Police Department - and mostly succeeding in that.

And as we talked, one thing became painful obvious in its clarity: I never should have left. Something of which my friend pointedly reminded me of. When he asked me, inevitably, I suppose, why, I had no answer to give.

We all ask ourselves that question, that "Why?", and it takes a certain level of introspection to come up with an answer, a level of introspection that I suspect most of us just don't have. I'm certainly not certain that I do. What answer could I possibly give him, what answer could he possibly understand?

I went to a very dark place in those twenty years since the last time I saw him, a place of nightmares and shattered hopes, populated by the lost and forgotten. How does one explain to someone who's never seen it the brutality that we are capable of inflicting on each other? Yes, I've left that part of my life behind me, and yet in many ways, I've never left it. Call it a case of questionable judgment or collateral damage, if you will, but the things I've seen can never be unseen, there is some damge done to the soul that can never be undone.

So, I guess, there is just no answer for that particular question. I had to live in a place where people held there own lives to be meaningless and, in the process, my own life became meaningless. Such is the way of the world, I suppose.

I never should have left. I would, perhaps, have been a better man if I had not. But that's another battle from a war long past, a moment in time gone beyond all hope of recall. Things can never be the same, nor should they be. All I can do now is be the friend that I should have been, and be the uncle that I should have been. Perhaps then my friends and my family can finally forgive me, and I can finally stop waiting on a lifetime.