I met my younger self for coffee

I met my younger self for coffee.

But there was no younger self.

I am her.

I have pored over countless writings about meeting the younger self, each one drenched in a melancholic nostalgia

I have cried, I have laughed, but mostly, I have cried. I cried for reasons too many to name. I cried because I wondered if there was peace in the peculiar ways they chose their words, in the quiet spaces between them. I cried because I wondered if they still carried worry like a heavy stone in their pocket the way I do, if happiness, for them, was something that stayed or merely something that visited.

I have wondered if they think of themselves now as another version they will someday meet again, over another coffee, with another set of questions, another set of wounds, another set of hard-won joys. I have wondered many things, but mostly, I have wondered about myself.

In the past year, I have known loss. Not the kind that comes and goes like a season, but the kind that burrows into the bones and rearranges you. I have felt the deepest loss one can feel: I lost myself.

So I will tell my younger self that I am on my way. I am coming to find her, to tell her that I have gathered gifts along the way, gifts of knowledge, of grief, of the things only loss can teach.

I want to tell her we will be alright. I want to say it with conviction, but loss has made a stranger of the confidence I once knew. Still, I will say it: We will be good. We will be great. Because she still remembers the weight of words like nihilism and Weltschmerz, she still remembers that she was always a seeker, always someone who gathered knowledge like breadcrumbs leading her home, she still remembers that even when she did not know where the road would lead, she still walked it.