You lose touch after a while. The past is nothing more than the past and the old running buddies from the old stomping grounds are nothing more than part of your history. This took me a while to learn but I learned this, nonetheless. And for the record, I still remember. I’m sure you do too. I remember my old friends the same as I remember the stories that we shared together. I suppose what happens is we move on or in some cases, maybe we grow up. Either way, eventually, the past becomes old chapters that seem like stories, which happened in a different lifetime.

I had to take a step back. I had to break away for a moment just to detach. So before going forward, I want to be clear that I am doing this because I choose to and not because I have to. I want to be very clear that although I write honestly and openly, my aim is clear and therefore, I refuse the notions that one is in pain because they write about pain. I refuse the ideas that one has to be in love to write about love and I reject the opinions that assume a person is in crisis, simply because they write about crisis. This is not my case at all. Instead, I expose my weakness to gain strength. I expose my fears to become brave and I reveal my truths because, with a humble heart, this is me.

Maybe it’s the summer. Maybe it’s the heat and the build of tension like the humidity before the storm until — ah; the rain comes down to soak the dust of our crazy lives. Maybe it’s the social tensions around us or maybe this is really simple; it’s just difficult because we, ourselves, are complicated.

I’m not sure if you can see me where you are, up so high, but this is me, right here.

Have you ever been on a construction site from start to finish? Or wait, have you ever seen a building start from a hole in the ground and build from the foundation to the top? Sometimes life in the eyes of our mind is moving in the clips of elapsed frames or in stages, like a science film of a blossoming of a flower. 

There has always been something calming about the sound of raindrops falling on the roof of my house. I can hear the chattering tires from the passing cars that drive by on the wet streets. I swear this is like a lullaby. I can feel the gentle hush, which to me is the kindness of Mother Earth as she reminds us to sit back and relax.

Here’s to you.
Here’s to the summer and the upcoming months.
Here’s to the little towns that nobody knows about where little kids chase down ice cream trucks and buy candies that make their tongues turn blue.

There was a little town just a few miles above the border at Juarez. I remember this like a picture in my mind. I know I was there and yet, the memory is more like a story that I was told about a life that happened to someone else.
I had been in the car with my family for hours. This long drive began from my Mother’s hometown in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The drive was mainly through an open and empty highway with nothing else around us except for the desert.
I had never seen anything like this before. The desert itself was vast and vacant, barren and empty, and yet beautiful at the same time. The sands ran on for miles with a shade of perfect emptiness.
We began this trip in the early morning when the sun came up. I could only imagine what a drive like this would be like at nighttime when the sky is nothing else but a full moon and a sea of glistening stars. 

Do you want some honesty?
I suppose there was a realization, or better yet, I suppose a time came when I figured to myself, “I wonder if I would hear from certain people if I wasn’t the one to make the phone calls” And then I wondered some more about this. Next, I tested my theory. In some cases, I learned that I was right. In some cases, I learned that I was better off like this. And in other cases, I had to figure out if I was happier this way. I have met different people at different times in my life. Some of these people have remained in my life and some of them are those who I call my loved ones. Some of the people in my life were only temporary and never to be heard from again, which is fine because this is how life is. In some cases, we stay connected. In other cases, we lose touch.

It’s nice to see the masks come down. It’s nice to walk by and see someone smile or just see another face without a surgical mask over the nose and mouth. It’s nice to hear that we might be ahead of this, which means the pandemic might be behind us now. And this is it, the year 2021. Who knows what might come next. Who knows if this whole test is just another moment in purgatory. Or better yet, maybe this is just a social experiment to see how we’d treat each other or how we’d get along if something went wrong. Well, if this were true, I suppose the next questions is , “Okay, so how’d we do?

And here it comes. The summertime. Here comes the memories of being a child, riding around on the streets of the old neighborhood with a bicycle and a few friends. I have this dream sometimes. The dream itself must be an old memory. I suppose it has to be a memory because the place and the vision is real. I can see the streets of my town and the way they were to me then and this was it. This is where I grew up.

We are all a product in progress. I know this. I know what this means to me but then again, I come from a different time. I come from time before technology took over the world. This is a time before the internet. I come from way back when people used their home phones. I remember when answering machines came around and when rotary phones became a thing of the past. I remember music and music stores with albums and record players.
There were no cell phones or phones with cameras or video. In fact, I come from a time when there weren’t cameras everywhere you turn.
I can say that my youth was fortunately before the blitz of what technology has become, which is almost everything. I came from a time before the cell phone craze. There was no texting or Facebook messaging. There was no such thing as social media. There was only talking and personal interaction and, therefore; there were fewer moments of misread intentions.