Last night's drunken blur is still rattling around in my head. I met up with a very old friend from back east, whom I had not seen in well over a decade. We both escaped from Castleton some time ago, so all of the residuals of those years match up to the point that we're speaking the same language about those years. And this kind of thing is more rare than it should be, in my opinion.
That said, I didn't meet up with him without a thin slice of apprehension hovering over me. Because knowledge of me from those days is an uncomfortable power, and I'm still dealing with my own issues regarding that. I am not the same person now that I was then, and the idea that there are still people walking around out there with the old me stuck in their heads is something I spend way too much time thinking about as it is. But as I told him in a message a few weeks ago, all those issues should be fading into nothing with the years. That I somehow let that limit my current interactions with people a preconception just as stupid as the ones that I'm dealing with. And that's no way to live.
But that all evaporated in short order, with the help of cider and cigarettes. There was no other way for it to go, really. Because we are the people that we are today, and while the past is a component of that, it won't define us fully. The fact that we escaped makes that so.
I should probably slap some context around that word 'escape' because it might not make much sense just sitting out there like that. Yes, we are not living there any longer, which is a critical part. But we are also not living in the mindset of that place. We have become critical thinkers. We have accepted new experiences and new ideals. We have embraced the world beyond those hills. And while this may sound very mundane to some, there are so many of us who did not make this leap.
There are members of my family who did not do this, and there is some cognitive dissonance talking with them about certain things. There are some conversations that can never be had with them, because there is no basis to start having them on. I'm okay with them living lives that make them happy, but I would never have made that work for me. The idea of living that life, so critical to my family going back many years, scared the crap out of me.
That's why, to the people that I left behind, I dropped off the face of the earth back in 1996. I was so scared of that place that I avoided dealing with it for some time. Even after escaping, the mental blocks that are created by that place are hard to overcome, and are downright impossible without the right perspective on things. But since Thanksgiving of last year, when I did run into some folks that hadn't seen me since I ran off, this attitude has been thawing a bit.
The important bits didn't happen at the beginning, of course. That all happened in the donut shop across the street several hours after we met up, when we were trying to sober up enough to head our separate ways. In the harsh light, eating crappy sandwiches and surrounded by folks that populate the city slightly before sunrise, that was when our conversation fully blossomed. This was not an accident by any means.
We talked about Castleton, leaving very few stones unturned. While we wondered down that path, we talked about the last few years for both of us, and how we fell the way we did. It was cathartic having a conversation about it with someone who was there for it all. While the past was certainly the basis for this conversation, it was not the important part at all.
And I should have known that this would have been the case all along, but for me the past gets to jammed in my head sometimes that it's hard to reason out the rest of things. This man that I had been so hesitant to talk to for so long talked about how he had appreciated the person I had been so many years ago. The me that I had spent a decade killing over and over again in my head was not the demon I had made out of him, apparently. This was an eye-opening moment for me, because not only did it make me feel a bit foolish for being so heavy-handed to myself
We agreed to get together again soon, and we certainly will. And I hope I've made a bit more sense of things for myself by then, because even when laying in bed a few hours later, I still had more questions. I still had more answers.