I'm not in the mood for crazy Wednesday questions this week, so I will reissue one of my more serious posts...I will return to the Wednesday questions next week. so, from last Summer....
"A Ghost Of My Possible Futures"
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Have you ever made eye contact with a complete stranger and that one second of connection has haunted you?
I was in town a couple of weeks ago running some errands, and I got my "honey do's" done and was headed back up Main Street, when I noticed on my right, an elderly man standing by the side of the road. He was a bit ahead of me, and I really didn't put too much interest or thought into him being there. As the light I sat at turned green, and I began to pull up to him, I just glanced over to see what he was all about, because it was broiling hot and steamy humid and he was wearing long dark slacks and a long sleeved shirt that was untucked. When I pulled past him his eyes met mine and he simply gave me a look of unbearable emotional pain. He was holding a 12 pack of cheap beer and I could sense how badly he needed it. His face was haunting. It had deep lines carved around his mouth, and his dark eyes shot at me, even though he was squinting through ragged crow's feet in the powerful sunlight. His hair was a tousle of dirty gray, and looked like it has been just carelessly heaped onto his head so he could go fetch his morning pain relief.
I only caught his eyes for a brief second, and I pulled past and only looked back for a second as he still stood there in what was surely mounting frustration...
I began to think about him over the next few days, and then into the following weeks where I still cant shake him from my mind.
What is that man's story? I have thought about the mounting failures of his life, and his loss and maybe even his times of joy, so long ago.
Do I judge him too harshly, because of the way he looks? Perhaps, but his eyes told me everything I needed to know. You see, I was easily headed for the same path just a few short years ago with my endless nightmare of booze and substance abuse. I KNOW that look he had, for I have looked in the mirror at my much younger face in those dreadful days of being lost, and have felt the same agony I recognized in him.
Perhaps, he was just an apparition, sent to remind me that if I sway from the course of pure sobriety, I will eventually become that same elderly man, shakily holding his precious nectar...the cans sweating in the heat, his head sweating from an agonizing enslavement to his past, and to the bottle. He is a ghost of my possible futures come to haunt me before I allow my own death to overtake me once again.
I will never forget him, and I do pray for him first of all to find the way to inner peace and secondly for myself to never forget the lesson given to me in that brief meeting of our eyes and hearts.
Thank you, God.
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