Going home for the first time in 40 years rarely returns the same person.
Things change, people change, stories change, and his youthful life on a now abandoned small town Colorado farm is liable to answer many questions he’d rather not.
But it’s time to grow up and he’s driven by the gnawing truth of a need to know.
Ignorance is bliss when you’re a child.
But as grown man, decades later, ignorance loses the soothing capacity that made a difficult life bearable at 7 years old.
Truth tends to sour the sweet and connect family dots in ways that never made sense in single digit years but every sense for a 50 year old in need of answers and their consequences.
Going home again breaks family secrets, exposing well-intended protective lies which have haunted him with so many questions he’s now compelled to answer before all depositions are dead and unavailable and it’s too late to correct history.
So he’s going home.
Like so many, we grow up with fond recollections of what we were told was a normal life but with a persistent, grating curiosity about the real truths behind them that we’ll address on a better day somewhere, somehow, sometime.
But time is not the great healer it promised to be.
So many events of our lives are proudly recalled in cocktail conversations which didn’t end the unnerving, silent question marks hidden from others and ourselves because we just want to fit in, and be normal, and for them to just go away.
But forty years later, we find we’re no more normal than we’d chosen to believe all these years, and living with those nagging inconsistencies drags us back to the place of their birth for a private intervention that will very likely drop him or any of us in pieces on the floor of an abandoned farmhouse somewhere alone in Colorado asking all the whys with no one there to answer.
Go home, good friend.
And when you return, I’ll be here to help you pick up those shattered pieces and assemble your once favorite stories into a painful new narrative of truth that hurts so much but heals so much more.
I’ll be waiting here with no better answers but to help unpack the discoveries in your new baggage and put it all away for good.
And maybe then, you can finally grow up.
I promise it will be wonderful.