Letter to Someone Lost

To the person whom I do not recognize anymore:

I am watching you from an inseparable distance and watching you change and shift in so many ways. Sometimes I think that I am imagining these changes; that in a moment, my eyes will flutter and you will be standing before me, the same person I always knew. But the moment passes and the deception dies.

I grow sick in my heart seeing the person you're becoming. Everything you said you stood for, everything you seemed to believe is gone. I miss that person; I wish I could say I miss you, but perhaps all these changes is you becoming the person you were meant to be.

It seemed that when I knew you, you were so solid: unchanging, never-ending, strong. But this person I am confronted by now bears no resemblance; there is nothing to grasp and you fade away, slipping through my fingers like wisps of smoke or rivulets of sand and then you are gone.

I wish I could tell you that I will remain here, unbroken by time and distance, the same person you knew as well. But I am changing too. I am no longer just watching you become what you are; I am doing what I must to withstand the tempest that is your life, that link that still stretches between us - feint, weak, tenuous, but still there. And as we grow, we shape and mold ourselves into the people we best believe will make us happy.

I hope that what you reach for does not elude you: the happiness you seek, the happiness you think you can find and could never find in me. I hope that all the sacrifices you make and all the things you let drop from you are worth it all in the end. I hope that when you are done with this, you still recognize yourself; that you can look yourself in the eyes and see traces of the person you once were, the person worth more than a disdainful thought and a few passing lines of derision laced with sorrow.

I will never see you again for the person you were, only the person you've become. I wish I could hang on to some semblance of the past and take it with me into the future, but you can not hang on to what no longer exists, what may never have been in the first place. I push myself further away from all that I held dear in you and hope that distance will give me perspective, knowing that separation brings me peace.

I will keen for many things: I will lament for what you were. But I will never mourn the person you've become. You have your reasons, I have mine. And though I may not recognize you, beneath the glimmer, glitter, gilt, and grime, you are more transparent than you think possible. You are as plain to me as you have always been. And all that I do not recognize in you is now everything I saw before and lacked acknowledgment of. You are nothing more than you have always been....