Dear _______,

You’ll probably never read this. You might even be dead. But I was just thinking about you. I was just thinking about how we used to be best friends.

But that was then. This is now. Now, I don’t even know you. I could pass by you on the street, or in a store, and not recognize you. How crazy is that? We grew up together and now I don’t even know what you look like!

Or maybe I would recognize you but wouldn’t say anything because I wouldn’t quite know what to say. What the hell do you say to someone you’ve not seen in 20 years? What is there to say? After all the nostalgia and backslaps, what is there to talk about? What would we have in common?

Let’s face it. We’re basically strangers. You’ve moved on. I’ve moved on. We’ve ventured down our respective paths. We’ve found our niches. We’ve made new friends, lives and lovers, and had two decades of successes and failures. Any me and any you, every me and every you, that we knew, is gone. That person is a ghost now, living on, spectrally, in the occasional haunting of a thought.

That person has ceased to actively exist.

It’s okay. Really, it is. I’m not one for nostalgia. I see time as linear, progressing. At least it should be that way. I always pity those living in the past.

Remember ___? Oh, man, I saw him a few years back. All the drugs we took in high school, I think they’ve rotted his mind. Or maybe he’s just going crazy. Wasn’t his uncle crazy? Didn’t his uncle OD and die? _____ is way gone, man. He won’t even pick up his phone. I messaged him on Facebook, like three years ago, and he still hasn’t replied.

But yeah, I bring him up because the last time I saw him he was rambling about a person from 25 years ago, 30 years ago, almost, now, and he was going on about it as if it all happened yesterday. He was fuming, I mean, really, fuming, and ruminating over an incident from 30 damn years ago. He was there, in that time. He was crystallized in that time. He was a hostage to that time.

That’s not me. I’m not a hostage. I don’t have Stockholm Syndrome. I’m here. I’m in the here and now. Look, I live thousands of miles away, oceans and mountains away, from our old neighborhood. I’m miles away from those days, literally and figuratively. I’m not there. That time is history. It’s over. Its sun has set.

Not that we can’t remember it. Not that we can’t learn from it. I’m trying to learn from it. I’m trying to grow and learn from my mistakes. But I’m not occupied by my mistakes. Even the worst mistakes. Even the most tragic of mistakes, mistakes that might still fall under a statute of limitations. Even the people I irreparably hurt. Even the people who irreparably hurt me. I’m over it. I wouldn’t say I’m apathetic. I wouldn’t say I’m bitter. I’m just ... Over it.

I really hope you’re the same way. I’m hoping you’re not a hostage to those memories. Like when we got robbed at gunpoint. Thinking back, that was scary! What if those hoodies had squeezed the trigger? One or both of us wouldn’t be here. 26 years ago, we’d have been dead, lying like stick figures in pools of blood. Lying cold and dead next to the crooked basketball hoop in your backyard.

And over what? A shitty bag of weed? Maybe it was karma since you packed it with seeds and stems to fatten its weight ... What if we angered the Ganja Gods ... I don’t know...

But no, I’m not dwelling on anything. I’m not there. I’m not in that backyard, on that balmy summer night, watching fecklessly, mute and hot with defeat, that certain sort of sunken, victimized defeat that digs deep as your soul...