LETTER TO A DEAD MAN

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…

And those hoodies, I think one was South African, from his accent, yeah, I don’t know, and I wouldn’t wonder much about what became of them.

They could be in prison, like _____, that bully from middle school. Did you hear that he robbed a bank, shot a police dog, and is doing 20 years in prison? Maybe they’re all off in jail together… The bully, the South African hoodies…

Or those hoodies could be CEOs of multinational corporations. CEOs of corporate cannabis companies. Or they could be like _____, living in their parents’ basements, tormented by voices and ghosts.

Isn’t that what memories are? Ghosts?

Like I said, I don’t know you, but I hope you’re alive. I hope you’re okay.

I visited the old neighborhood not too long ago. Both of our houses had been torn down. They were both torn down, built over, made into gaudy McMansions. It is strange to think that neither of our old houses exist anymore. That someone is living there, new families living in our childhood homes.

There’s a yuppie right now living in the McMansion that arose over your old house. A Saab-driving yuppie. A yuppie and his family, and they probably named their kid “Augustus” or something pretentious like that.

And Augustus is playing on a swing set, right where we were robbed at gunpoint. Augustus probably sleeps in a room built over the room where you lost your virginity. He’s there. Augustus is in the present. Augustus doesn’t know our ghosts. Nor should he.

Just think of it, there’s a person, right now, wearing your old clothes, wearing my old clothes. There’s a person driving your old car. There’s a person living in your old apartment, and you’ll never know him or her and they’ll never know you, but you have a connection to them.

There’s an outdoor city market in Nigeria that sells “Dead White Man’s Clothes,” clothes donated to charities, clothes eventually sold on the streets of Lagos.

Someone in Africa is probably wearing your father’s gray corduroy pants. Your father’s corduroy pants and a Buffalo Bills 1993 Super Bowl Champions shirt.

But that’s the cycle of life. It turns and moves and will until the universe expands into a void. It’s the cycle of creation and decimation. There’s material from the Big Bang in your DNA and mine! And once we’re dead, our molecules will return to the atmosphere, into space, into the cosmos… It’s all interconnected, we’re all interconnected, and there’s a beauty and a horror to that…

How an atom looks like a solar system, and so forth…

Like the strawberry you ate that was grown in human feces, human waste trucked in from New York City. And molecules of every dead poet were in your soy milk…

It’s the cycle of life. Like how Walt Whitman wrote about grass being the hair of the dead. It’s like that. It’s all interconnected.

Pretty much, this very letter is a communication from a ghost to a ghost.

But if I’m ever a ghost, like a real ghost, I would probably haunt our old neighborhood. Haunt the house built over my old house. I wouldn’t be a poltergeist, though. I wouldn’t bother anyone. I’d just be there. Watching. As a voyeur. I could see most ghosts being voyeurs. Silent spectators. Ghosts watching the living like the living watch Netflix.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, whatever you exists now, I hope you’re well. I’ll write you again in ten years. Let’s try to talk every ten years.

Sincerely,

_________