Dear Lost Boy (pt. 3): The Final Chapter

Dear Lost Boy,

This is it.

This is the last letter I ever plan on writing to you on here. Maybe someday you'll receive something from me by pigeon mail, but for now, this is the only thing I've got.

Lost Boy.

I remember penning that name for you in the first letter I wrote. The letter where I tried to make sense of exactly what I was feeling and put as much positivity into it as I could. Your name stuck around for   the second letter I wrote, one that mentally and emotionally exhausted me to write, because the subject matter was still so raw.

When I was with you, I don't think you ever found yourself in the way that I think you have now. I was in the process of finally grounding myself while you were still reeling from a blow to your core and working through the shaky foundations of who you wanted to be.

Hearing your voice for the first time in months was an unsettling phenomenon. 

Your voice objectively sounded the same on the phone. The same inflections, the same tonality, the same filler words.

But the person behind it was a stranger.

I didn't know anything about your new college friends or your inside jokes or the way you wore your hair now (though I doubt it's anything crazy). I didn't know what songs hit your heart or the colors that made you smile or the stories that made you cringe.

My dad asked how you were a few months ago. I told him I didn't know.

In the same way, you didn't know the new shirt that I loved, and you didn't know my favorite color now, and you didn't know my future plans. You didn't know the loneliness that ached within me when I was surrounded by other people. You didn't know the way I cried when my roommate's anger left me with a bruise.

If someone asked you how I was doing, would you have even been able to accurately know?

* * *

Lost Boy, comparison is the thief of joy.

I never understood that quote outside of the context of comparing my shoes to someone else's or frivolous things of that nature, but I can see now another kind of deadly comparison: comparison to the past.

The ghost of you and the shadow of what might have been is something that sometimes hovers around my mind. Like in another lifetime or another galaxy there's another you and another me and things are working this time. Things went right in ways that went wrong in this lifetime, and smiles are never torn off of faces because of actions that cannot be taken back. It's these ideas that haunt me the most, unexpectedly, because "what if" is a dangerous game to play, and I've always been a competitor.

But it's not so much that I want you. I can see that. What I want is the idea of you, the person that I think I always wished you were. But that just wasn't your character, and it wasn't my job to carve off the edges of you that were sharp and jagged in ways that only you could fix.

My idea of you is not someone you will ever be.

At least not with me.

* * *

Lost Boy, the clock is ticking.

We only get so much time on this earth to wander, to laugh, to sing, to run like there's nothing holding us back.

You broke part of me in the time we were together. Maybe not all at once, but you chipped away at parts of me that I thought were holding steady, and I know there have been things I did that didn't help you flourish.

But I have to let you go. I have to let this idea of you rest and I have to consciously make sure that the forefront of my mind is not a place for you to be. Leaving you before was more of a physical release, and now it's a mental battle.

Because you are not the only person in the world to love and cherish and protect against the sadness and heartache of life. There are others, in the form of friends and family and other loved ones. I made my universe revolve around you in a way that I didn't expect, and I know now that I have to be careful not to clutch my fist around stardust that doesn't belong in this part of the galaxy. And, honestly, I don't know if you're doing the same. From the way you sounded when we last spoke, it sounds like you've let go of your fistful of the stars.

But if you're still holding on to them, maybe it's time to let them go. Stars are beautiful, but they're molten, scalding little balls of flame that will burn you if you hang on to them too long.

* * *

Lost Boy,

I can't keep beating myself up for "not trying hard enough." You always compared me to a flower, and flowers were made for gardens, or so I heard once in a song. And you just weren't the garden I needed. I couldn't grow and thrive with you in the way that I needed to, and that's something that I cannot change, not even if I wanted to with every fiber of my being.

Letting you go has allowed me to find myself, find my faith, and reestablish my roots back into the soil that they were torn from.

It's time to grow again.

* * *

I don't miss you.

Not in the way that I once did, where I desperately wanted to see you or see your name light up my phone. I heard a Jake Scott song the other day that said, "Loving you would always feel wrong."

And it hit me.

It doesn't matter if I wanted to go back and try harder to see if I could change the future. Because at the end of the day something would always sit wrong with me, and my heart would always tell me to run, even if my head thought I wanted to stay.

* * *

I'm leaving Lost Boy behind.

I hope he's found someday.

That is all.

Cheers,