going home

The kid who made sure I didn't get beat up in junior high is now a homeless addict in a big city. He was middle class, our parents are still friends. I was in that city last weekend, I could have passed him on the street and wouldn't have known.

*

Early morning hours in a hot tub, looking at stars, we've all been drinking all day. He used to be a beautiful asshole; now his hand grazes my arm. I move it away. Twice.

"You still look like you did the day I met you," him, earlier, referring to the decade before.

Going home is strange. The power shift. His edge is mostly hidden somewhere under a beer paunch growing in years since I was last here.

Is it satisfying to reject a former tormentor?

Yes.

It was never my intention to show them or prove something. It's when I'm standing side by side with the ghosts of all the last summers, when I go back to a place that never changed, it's easy to compare. My family has kept me there in my absence, telling where I am, what I'm doing. A lost fiction, standing there in sunglasses and cut off shorts.

remember me?

It actually didn't occur to me that anyone would notice, residual teenage invisibility syndrome, maybe. I have always expected to be reduced to an awkward fifteen year old on returning home. Looking around me like everyone else was cooler and I was just a year or two away from figuring it out. As played by the girl in the glasses, with the secret shapely legs underneath the same jeans she's had forever, three scenes away from attracting the high school quarterback who can never love her because she likes art films.