Strangers

I had last seen my father when I was nine.  A bitter custody battle that kind of fizzled out, ending in burnt bridges, custody visits, and marked by an anti-climactic end.  A card in the mail on a Friday.  Couldn't make it, he was sick.  See you next weekend.  Decades passed.

I remembered some things about him clearly, but most of it was fuzzy.  I could hear his thick Spanish accent.  I could see his face, or how it looked twenty plus years before, when I was a child.  Tall, dark skin, mustache.  Big white cowboy hat.  Really, I think I just remembered him as what I saw in the pictures.  An idea of him, an amalgamation of old photos transposed onto a body, up on the big screen of my mental movie projector.

When we finally met again, me in my thirties, him twice that, I saw the similarities between us.  I looked like him, from when I was a kid and he was my dad. 

Meeting again after all this time.  Having grown up just across town from him.  So close, but so far away.  Living in two realities.  Reuniting, it was like looking into the future, into a mirror.  I could see what I would look like in twenty or thirty years.  He smiled.  It was my smile. 

We shook hands.  We hugged.  We began getting to know each other.

No hard feelings. 

No longer strangers.