This was written by me almost a year ago as I prepared to meet my friends from school. Friends I was going to meet after thirty-two years.
I will meet with my old friends today. Thirty-two years separate me from many of them. Yet, it feels like I will meet them, as I was in my youth.
Youth! I can barely recall.
Fragments!
An occurrence here, a milestone there. That is all that remains of my youth. Like an unfinished piece of art, I am missing elements that make me what I am; who I am. Still, here I am! Incomplete, missing significant portions. Yet, completely intact! A paradox, corporealized!
Or, am I?
My interactions with my friends, my little squabbles, the mischief that I have gotten into with them, all have shaped the man I am today. But, like a house that is not aware of the significance, or the presence of all the bricks that constitute it, I am no longer aware of many of my friends, and my interactions with them that have sculpted me. The incessant flow of time, and the ensuing corruption by entropy, has eroded that away from my amorphous consciousness. While I can no longer recollect, every interaction is still grafted into my being.
Yet, I feel loss.
I do not know what I have lost. Or the worth of what I have lost. I just know that I have. Yet, I know that nothing is lost. I am the product of everything that I have lost, and not lost. I am both — the path and the traveler.
As I prepare for my much overdue rendezvous, I am filled with trepidation and eagerness. Trepidation about not knowing how I would fit in with my old friends. How would it be different, now that over three decades have intervened? And eagerness, to reminisce, relive and rekindle what I consider to be the best times of my life.
But, no matter what, of one thing I am certain — I will return adding another brick to the edifice of my being.
Perhaps, I will even return with awareness of one or more of my forgotten blocks.
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