Written November 11, 2012

I was lost. I don't mean it in the way that I didn't know where I was, or didn't know where to go (although that too), but lost in the way that I, looking in at myself from the outside, didn't know where I had gone. I was two separate people: my Self who ran away, and my Self who walked the roads trying to find me. A few close friends and one gentle stranger helped me put up "MISSING" posters, but in the end it was evidently entirely up to me to find my Self. So I began to seriously search. The search consumed my entire life. My every day and my every night. I searched not stopping for over six months. One day, I was in the middle of a search when I sat down at the side of the road and began to cry. I cried for my lost Self, and I cried because I was finally starting to accept my lost Self was never coming home. At that moment, I looked up and wiped my tears, and looked across the road. It was someone who looked so remarkably like the Self I lost, but in an inexplicable way, equally entirely different. I walked up to it, confused, and asked it if it knew a Self that looked a lot like it but not exactly. It told me it did, but it regretted to inform me that Self was dead, but it was my new self and it was just born. To this day, I mourn the death of the Self I lost, but like everything else has its time, so do Selfs. I now know that Selfs are not lost and found, but in fact dead and reborn into something similar, but also completely new.