[Stug3]

Twenty years...my god.
I can hardly believe I have been so long from the life I once lived; I scarcely remember who I was then. A broken boy at the edge of manhood who stepped from one world...to another. Running away from demons he would never escape, that damaged boy with the dead eye and a scared soul...
How can you banish demons that make you what you are... who you are? You cannot run from yourself no matter how far you go...wherever you go, there you are.
Perhaps there is no solution and you just settle in to an uneasy truce...a mutually beneficial 'cease fire' no ground gained nor any lost.
In twenty years I would have thought I would find answers...perhaps there are none and in time we find only something that works for each of us......
Recently I find myself to be a much more social creature and I have begun to ask myself one thing...have I squandered my time...
For nearly twenty years I held myself from others, led a solitary life of roaming and gathering and spent little time making friends. Have these decisions been a mistake made over and over again...we all have that one thing we do wrong consistently, is this mine?
I have seen and done much, some of it more than most would call rational, just what consequences do my actions have... I have collected so much, yet I have collected so little as well...what would 200 boxes of corn fetch if I traded it in for time? Perhaps had I been...say... in Hemp... I might have met that nice girl and had a conversation with her, traveled with her and possibly grown to lover her. Have I traded a family for commodities and just how much would a family be worth at the Market? That one moment in time I missed and lost forever...What would that moment be worth, twenty, one hundred or perhaps ten-thousand boxes....I might have traveled with a surly Dwarf to places unknown and seen the greatest sight in my life...how many boxes of aloe did that cost?
My customers paid in coin, what have I paid in...
What is the measure of a man; do you weight him against how much gold he possesses, how many call him a friend, by his deeds and actions, how many mourn his death or that one person who loved him a lifetime? When it is all said and done what gets put on the other side?
What counter weight will be placed on the scales for me...I have but a handful I can call friends and less to call anymore than that. Is the measure of my life the combined weight of my collections or the events that passed while I wandered alone...?
Twenty years since I walked out that gate, a boy with a dead eye and a broken soul...have I changed so much since then, have I changed any? Or am I merely now a man with a dead eye and broken soul...
They say "home is where the heart is" but they also say "You can never go home again"

How true...