Just Passing Through

All of us are just passing through. We pass through this world and we pass through other peoples lives. For some we are there only for a short time and with others we stay and become entwined like ivy growing on the side of a building. Each time we pass through someones life we change it. We add a memory and history to the lives we pass along the way.

This week a childhood friend passed away. I heard about it on facebook. I haven't seen him since Junior High School. We reconnected on facebook along with most of the kids I hung out with growing up. We were a neighborhood gang of kids before being in a neighborhood gang became a negative thing. We rode our bikes and played freeze tag in the park. Like true New Yorkers we played stickball and King/Queen against the convent wall of the girls Catholic school. There was of course the proverbial mailbox on the corner where we hung out. As we got older we spent more time by the mailbox than we did playing games.

I have lived a whole shitload of my life without seeing my friend. I got a career, a family and I moved away from the hood. Same for him. Yet when I'm back there and I walk those same streets I can here the echo of our voices. All I have to do is close my eyes and I am once again the skinny, slightly awkward girl with the long brown hair and glasses. Back then I only wished I was cooler and oh yeah, had bigger boobs! Now she makes me smile. I never got to see him before he passed away. I'm guessing that like most of us we are very much like who we were back then, only a hopefully better version. Life shapes us but the basic lump of clay that was forming into somebody way back then is still at our core, for better or for worse!

I'm grateful for facebook. It helped bring back some wonderful memories and it answered all the " I wonder whatever happened to" questions. Now whenever I feel like it I can reach out and touch a piece of my past. My friend who passed away was part of all that. Because he passed through my life I have memories and history that I can thank him for. I wish we could have had a chance to laugh about the dumbass stuff we did as kids but that's life. We're all only passing through but the memories and the history and the people we touch along the way are like a permanent signpost that says yes, we were here.