A Letter to a Version of Me That No Longer Exists

I am writing to you
the way one writes to a house
after it has been emptied—
not to ask who lives there now,
but to remember how light once
learned the shape of its rooms.

You would recognize the handwriting.
You would not recognize the hand.

Once, you believed time moved
like a straight road,
obedient, predictable,
with milestones placed kindly
at visible distances.
You trusted effort.
You trusted endurance.
You trusted that if you stayed awake
long enough,
everything would eventually explain itself.

I am not here to correct you.
Only to speak across the quiet
that followed.

Do you remember how fiercely
you held on?
As if holding were the same as loving.
As if tightening your grip
could persuade the universe
to stop rearranging itself.

You mistook motion for loss.
You mistook change for betrayal.
You mistook endings for failures
instead of doorways
disguised as walls.

I want to tell you
you were not wrong to care that deeply.
Only young in the way stars are young—
burning bright without yet knowing
how much fuel they carry,
or what it means to collapse
into something smaller, denser,
strangely more powerful.

Back then, you believed silence
meant absence.
You filled every gap with noise—
explanations, apologies, plans.
You did not yet understand
that silence is not empty,
that it is a field
where unseen things reorganize.

You feared stillness
because stillness felt like erasure.
Now I know
it is a threshold.

You asked the wrong questions
with such beautiful sincerity.
You asked,
“Who will stay?”
instead of,
“Who am I becoming?”
You asked,
“How do I keep this?”
instead of,
“What is this teaching me to release?”

You were so loyal to versions of yourself
that were already dissolving.
You kept showing up
for identities that had quietly resigned,
like actors leaving the stage
after the final curtain
while you applauded the darkness.

If I could reach you—
not to change anything,
only to sit beside you—
I would say this gently:

Nothing you lost was taken.
It was returned
to the larger circulation of becoming.

The self you were
did not vanish.
It composted.
It broke down into minerals,
into memory,
into instinct.
It feeds the roots of who I am now.

You believed growth would feel
like expansion.
You did not expect it
to feel like grief.
Like shedding skin
without anesthesia.
Like watching familiar constellations
lose their names.

But listen—
the sky did not empty.
It widened.

Some nights,
I still find traces of you
in old reflexes,
in the way my chest tightens
before hope,
in the way I hesitate
before joy
as if it might ask for proof.

You taught me caution.
You taught me tenderness.
You taught me how to survive
without becoming hard.

What you did not know—
what I know now—
is that survival is only the preface.
The real story begins
when safety no longer defines
the limits of desire.

You lived as if meaning were fragile,
as if one wrong step
could shatter it beyond repair.
I live knowing meaning is resilient,
that it migrates,
that it hides in unexpected ecosystems—
in unanswered questions,
in unfinished sentences,
in pauses that refuse to hurry.

I wish you could see
how the fractures you feared
became windows.
How the losses you counted
became coordinates.

From here,
identity is no longer a fixed address.
It is weather.
It is orbit.
It is a conversation
between gravity and momentum.

I no longer ask
who I was supposed to be.
I ask what wants to emerge
through me now.

This is not wisdom.
It is proximity—
standing close enough to uncertainty
that it no longer feels hostile,
only vast.

You would have called this version of me
unanchored.
You preferred maps.
I prefer stars.
They do not tell me where to go.
They remind me
how small direction really is
in the face of wonder.

If this letter reaches you
across the years—
know this:

You were necessary.
Every doubt.
Every stubborn hope.
Every moment you mistook endurance
for destiny.

You carried the question
until it could carry itself.

I am not wiser than you were.
Only more porous.
More willing to let the unknown
pass through
without demanding a name.

Somewhere,
a future version of me
is writing the same letter
to who I am now.
This thought no longer frightens me.

It comforts me.

It means nothing is wasted.
It means every self
is a draft the universe
was curious enough to try.

So rest now,
you former constellation,
you necessary season.
Your work is not undone.
It is complete
in the way rivers are complete
even as they keep moving.

I carry you
not as memory,
but as matter—
rearranged,
still luminous,
still part of the same expanding sky.