Hindsight

Flashback to 05/02/1987. Like any other 17 year old, my friends were my world, impressing them, my priority. Twenty two years later, Blaine sets up dinner on a night that we're all free. Ritchie and Tommy blow it off. Pete's detained by work. Blaine, Chris, Duane, Rachel, and I sit down to dinner. Olivia, our waitress, is wonderful, engaging, attentive. Alcohol flows, tongues loosen. The skeletal remains of past insecurities wash up on waves of nostalgia. But I am inherently different now...or so I thought.

I wear my past like a red badge of courage, proof that the depths of depravity are inhabitable. I flaunt it, deliver it on the butt of jokes about amorous cellmates and rusty shanks. Dad's ring tone is Darth Vader's labored breathing. Part of it is a giant fuck you to the other survivors who hide it like a hairy mole. Grandma behests, Don't tell a soul, lie if they ask...except when she marched me to the Social Security Office in Lynn. She told them I paced the floor non-stop in an effort to squeeze an over juiced system for disability. And why shouldn't you? The Spanish and the Blacks all do it all the time.

And so I sit through dinner. Split a burger with Rachel, my arm around her, caressing. We check out her ass when she goes to the bathroom, their praise validates my petty existence.

At her expense.

There was a time that I was quite astute at keeping my neurotic side from grabbing the wheel and driving us into a ravine. I think it's time to go back to therapy...