MAY 12, 2026.

It’s been a lifetime. At least it feels like it.

My life had gone in a different direction. The unexpected as expected, as I call it. I can never plan anything because ALL the things happen when I do.

In reality, it’s been 15 years, but might as well be a lifetime with how much the world has changed in that time. I hardly thought about him all these years, and I guess he did the same since I never received another letter or a call, or anything. He just disappeared again.

But recently my thought started to wander. They started doing that lately, far too easily too. A moment of silence is all my mind needs and suddenly it’s somewhere it shouldn’t be. That wandering has been made easier after I rediscovered his old journals. I still can’t believe I have them, but I remember him leaving a box with me asking to look after it while he looked for a new place. I think he must’ve forgotten, because the box was still here, unopened.

I can’t really say why I never opened it until now. It became part of the scenery, just collecting dust among other boxes full of god-knows-what.

All these journals were from the time before, hell, I think I have everything from before he left everything behind 20 years ago.  Pages and pages of hard to read rambling. Walls of ink that just… spoke. Much like his actual conversations.

It took me days to read through them, but I finally got to the point where his life really took a turn. Those 3 years before he left, before everything changed. It almost feels like it was a completely different author.

He describes it as “…everything lost its luster. I couldn’t see color anymore.”  His dramatic, melancholic nature (almost sickly) just dripping from the pages. There’s an entry that stuck with me though; it was around the same time him and I were talking and he would disappear for days at a time.  He wrote: “Everything changed in that exact moment.  Everything fell apart. My past, my present and my future completely erased in a matter of days. I’m not who I was before I came here, I don’t know who I am anymore and I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. I feel like I had a complete and total personality collapse. I’m a stranger in my own mind. I’m a new person born from all this failure.”

His journal entries became less and less frequent after that. The pages used to show day after day of entries, then weeks apart, months, at one point a couple years, and when he did, it wasn’t quite the same. His notebooks went from being actual journals to just pages of incoherent text. Talking endlessly about nothing. Where his pages were once full of items, maps, drawings, pictures, now only consisted of words. As if he was building a wall to hide all those previous memories.

 Maybe that’s why he left the box with me. Maybe he knew he wasn’t going to come back for it. Maybe he thought that by leaving his old self behind he would be able to find who he’s supposed to be. 

I hope he did, but something tells me he’s still punishing himself for his mistakes, for all the people he disappointed, for all that wasted potential. I feel he’s stuck, and the world has already moved far too much ahead for him to catch up.