You Should Be There

By Anonymous / Winter 2023

Dear N,

It’s me, You, from the future, or whatever we believe time/space is - I think we both are still at odds with the present physics. I think it is about 2015 for you, nearing the end of the year when you are preparing for the big New Years Party you always throw for your birthday. It’s always better to work and bartend on your birthday so everyone can come visit and have no obligation to stay or bring gifts - a beer, a shot, and a smile is all that is needed. Do you still feel it? That sense of finally ‘making it’? You have spent the past 7 years getting after it, huh? The coffee worked out, the bartending? The awards started to come, then the money. You were still pretty smart and stayed in the pocket. You’ve focused on the work and it showed and still shows. But you know that feeling every time you visit home? How something is off. Not quite right.

You should be there.

But the feeling goes away when you text whoever the new girl is for the week. You think they’ll forgive the years gone when they see the number of Instagram followers you’ve grown. The pride they feel when you send a check should soften the blow of missing you, and will only get easier as those checks increase. You got the awards you wanted in spades this year, the local and national, but the desire is still there. It was never about getting to where you wanted, Friend. It was the journey. All that bullshit we mocked, those cookie-cutter statements, turns out they got cheesy after years of being taken for granted.

You will be gone within ten months. It’s gonna be hard at first. The attention will wane and it feels a bit like withdrawals. Like getting sober. You will have not just the feeling, but the cemented understanding of being replaced. It is wonderfully brutal. The faceless named followers stay for the first year or so, then drop. It’ll take a few years, but you realize the world has always and only ever been behind the camera, not within it. You will leave Seattle loudly, but every sound silences. You will head to downtown Los Angeles and get a nice apartment and cushy consulting job - you are closer to the Family, so this must be better. It isn’t. It was not solely about the distance from home, but the separation of your purpose and pleasures. It’s the lifestyle that’s gonna kill you, it’s already killing your friends. You’ve always wanted to go back to school, go and do the hard things diligently as a form of meditation. You know your success stems from the fact that what you do comes naturally. You aren’t expanding or testing yourself.

This sounds heavy. It is. I think we lie to ourselves, I guess each other, when it’s convenient. But we always know the truth. This is the truth. You will never be happier than watching your brothers become fathers and making an uncle, a Tio, out of you. Evelyn will be born late April next year. You will be in New Orleans for a conference and justify missing her birth by doing business. You will regret this. You will meet her and she will be two days old and she will be perfect. This is the moment you realize you are moving back to California. Meeting her adds a new subset definition of love that you can’t quite articulate, something close to having your place outside your body and that’s just how it will be until you pass from this world.

Time becomes mystic and gorgeous. It’s ok to begin the forgiveness process, though you won’t for years. You are really good at being there for the family, for Ev, but you slowly let work creep up the importance ladder. Old habits come blossoming back like the weeds after good rain.

You will realize it’s not enough to compartmentalize the work, you must leave it. It’s your favorite drug. It just so happens to  also let you do other fun drugs, because everything is a drug. The fame, the girls, the success, the bottle, the pills. You get to the point of knowing the party was fun, but the music has stopped. The song is played out. You did. You remember that thing our Pops told us years ago, “Start doing what you should be doing before you have to”.

This is where it gets good, my friend. You make the decision to not only leave LA, but leave the Industry. You call Chris and explain your plan. You want to start over, you want a different life. You want to be there for the next generation, and not just near them, but involved with raising them. He is your younger brother, but always has been more mature, and only more so since Ev came along. As you expected, with no hesitation or qualifiers, he just says do you need help moving up. He just bought a new house and has a room for you indefinitely. This is the beginning of when you put those things you loved into context. You’ve never been a fan of comparing yourself to other people, but you learned to compare yourself to who you were. Bro, it all comes crashing, the clarity, like a prayed for earthquake. The addiction of staging photos with filters of fancy meals and wild parties is overthrown with Ev doing literally anything. A beer with your brothers is bittersweet, only because you realize how much time you lost with them by being gone for so long. It comes in waves, the joy and the regret, they seem like twins. It’s ok, though. You’re allowed to start forgiving yourself now. You won’t - but you are allowed to.

N, this is only the beginning of the change, the rebirth. Your love of physics turns to loving math and computer science. You go to the community college and get awards and scholarships and keep a 4.0. And then Matthew has a baby girl! Now you have Aliyah. A year later little Osk comes, he becomes your best friend in years. You get accepted to UCLA and UCSD, your top schools. You choose SD because LA left a bad taste in your mouth. All good. Then Theo comes! You’ve a whole little unit to live and love for. Your heart is coming back, you’re less cynical, you realize how lost you were in the most confident years of your life. You only ever wanted a chance to start over, to try again, to do it better. My friend, you did. And you will feel like you made it, again, but for the first time.