But the person who left isnt who goes home. This was pre face time pre email stand in line for a 2 minute phone call days. Smell the envelope of the girl who wrote you before opening it days. Your whole life changes and how you view it changes as so much becomes precious

And when you go back your excited and terrified all at once. Will you have changed to much? Your values? Too little? Will they scoff? Accept? Torment? Risk your career for their benefit or fun? The rules change. Consequences change.

Save for one guy on a train.
Who reminded me that its ok to be human. No big talk of where he’d been. No I would have joined speech. Just have a warm beer, and its a nice night for a ride. Check out those lights. I make this trip about once a month to see family

Have another. Cheaper than the bar car. Later we can grab a smoke on the back rail. You smoke? Yeah? I’ll give you one you can pay me back later. Must be nice getting home.
Yessir.
Yessir it was.

I know the world has changed. And folks look for reasons to hate it each other.
But somehow I hope somewhere that someone is sneaking a beer to a slick collar tonight. And telling them its ok to be human. Its ok to be scared of going home. Its ok to grow beyond your friends.

that rubberneckers, is why I don’t sleep lately. How far have we really fallen?
How far will we?
Are we to the point that instead of letting folks come of their own from innocence we need to beat them from them on some mythical altar?
Just don’t know anymore & not sure i want to

But something has to give. This cant go on. There’s not enough bonding just for being folks. Everything has to be a political position now. Everything has to meet some arbitrary phooka standard. People need to find themselves, or find each other, without these gradients.

Thats my late night take anyway. Gonna try to go back to sleep now. Going to remember being told a bawdy joke in the smoking car with a window down rolling through Virginia at night while others slept, with a buzz and wondering what had changed at home.
Because its changed a lot.