Ghosts from the past.

I have recently started using Facebook again.

It took me a long time to give in to actually having an account. Seeing all the drama that people talk about on other sites, it was one of the reasons that I decided to resist for as long as I did. 

However, something led me to the site.  A need to have to try to locate someone and it was for me a place to start.

FB is an odd place. 

I am now connected to people from all parts of my life,  including from my childhood.  There are people from my time at school, my time at University and in the later years too. 

There are some people who are quite clearly "scene", which has raised questions in the past from others on my list. But, no-one has really been brave enough to come out and directly ask. 

I do not divulge. But nothing would stop me from doing so.  

Most of the people I grew up with I rarely speak to on FB.  It is like they are there because we were once featured in that part of life, and for the main, that is where they remain.  There is the novelty of having a way to connect with people, but there's never an expectation that you have to, or indeed that you should.

In all honesty, that suits me fine.  I've changed a lot since then.  . . .

But the other night, someone made contact with me.  I haven't spoken to them in a long time and we are talking years here. Maybe even a decade or more. She was confused about a comment on my wall, that someone else had left and approached me about it. So, I clarified, we exchanged a brief update on life, loves and losses.  It seems that is something we both definitely share a lot of.

And just as we were saying our goodbyes, she let me know that M . . .someone that both she and I had known had committed suicide some time ago.

I hadn't known.  Not that there was any way or reason for me to have known.

But there are many things that I feel in regard to this . . .and to him.  I'm not going into these reasons now, but M has a part of my history.

I feel a sadness for him.

To know that the person that he was, has completely gone and that before his death he had become an isolated, yet hardened, even violent man.  She explained how an addiction to drugs had taken hold, how "just one", turned into something that controlled him and not the other way round.

I hadn't known.

The time we shared was a painful one.  There were wounds that took a long time to heal.  But despite all of that, I would never have wanted him to be in that place in the end, with no alternative or no where to turn.

I wonder often what happens.  How people grow into the places that they are. . . .where or if things could have been changed or shifted and for life to take on a different direction.

With M. There is nothing to shift.

It is something I will never know.