Birthdays

JP would have turned 40 today.

It's strange, being in this place; in some ways this feels like it could be one of the more vital times I've had in the past few years. I've made contact with some old friends--re-establishing some sort of framework of a past for myself; I'm moving toward meeting some new people--some of them friends of Tim and Squeaky, who have been wanting to meet me for a long while; others from the local feral-cat rescue group, with whom I've become affiliated recently. I'm starting to see my life once again as a place with possibilities in it, starting to plan some semblance of a future, no matter how vague those plans might be.

And in the middle of this tiny little pocket of hope, I'm bumbling happily along and turn a corner and there it is: JP would have turned 40 today.

I wonder if he would know me anymore, or if he would like what I've become. I have tried to stay true to the person I was--not so much out of guilt or a need to preserve what's gone, but because that person was the real me, the essential me, and to let go of that would not only have disrespected JP; it would have disrespected ME as well.

I talked to Debbi about it tonight, and we agreed: neither of us can imagine him at 40. I think, though, that the way the world has changed since he was 26 would have baffled him utterly; would have poked him and jabbed him and ground him down. I look at how angry most of the last twelve years have made me, how the world was taken over by an overprivileged jock-ocracy. I think of how betrayed he would have felt, and how cynical, how disillusioned, how miserably sad he would have become as his ultimate dream--his rock-star dream--faded away while the Fred Dursts, the Eminems, and all the rest came to ascendancy.

But no matter how angry, how cynical, how brokenhearted he might have become, I would have loved him still--.at 40, at 60, at 80--and so even though I know he's safe from all pain, and from any disappointment...even though I know these things, I would still so much rather have him here beside me. If he was here, we could bear those disappointmetns together; if he was here, I could love him as a person, instead of as a ideal memory, a long-gone dream.