While cleaning out the garage, sifting through the debris of forgotten years, I found an old photograph tucked into a small box, yellowed at the edges, stubborn against the dust.
I knew it before I even looked — the weight of it humming in my hands.
A snapshot of a boy I barely recognize now: hair a little wild, a smile a little too sure, eyes chasing something just beyond the frame as if he believed the world would always wait for him.
I wonder what he knew back then — or what he hadn't yet learned.
How many choices still lay untouched before him, how many hearts would be gathered and dropped along the way, how many nights would stretch endlessly beneath a sky too wide to hold all the questions that would come.
A boy smiling without knowing the cost of wonder.
A boy chasing after futures that would later burn themselves down to ash.
I am not haunted by what he hoped for — I am haunted by the purity of his not-knowing.
Sometimes, I envy him — the unbroken faith he carried into mornings, the way he threw himself into dreams like they were promises stitched into the fabric of the universe.
There is a lightness in his posture I can no longer summon, a recklessness lost to the slow erosion of time.
Now, I measure things more carefully: how much to hope, how much to say, how much to want.
Every emotion weighed like coins on a scale I no longer trust.
But other times, I pity him.
He had no idea how much the world can take without warning.
No idea how grief moves quietly — a door closing in a house you thought was empty.
Maybe he believed there would always be more time, more chances, more versions of himself waiting at the next turn.
Maybe he thought endings made noise when they came.
The boy in the photograph does not know that hope is a form of madness.
He does not know that someday, belief itself would feel like an act of rebellion.
I do not want to be him again.
But there are nights — heavy, silent nights — when my heart grows too loud and I miss the way he believed without hesitation.
I miss the way he didn’t know how much there was to fear — and loved anyway.
Carrying him inside me like a secret vow: that even in the hollowed-out corridors of time, some part of me would remain untouched. Some part would go on believing, even after the maps were burned and the stars forgot my name.
Maybe that is what the soul truly is —
not a single, unbroken flame,
but a field of scattered embers,
each ember belonging to a different version of ourselves,
flickering quietly across the infinite night,
each one whispering:
I was here. I am still here.
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