It has been many years since I last wrote to you.

To be honest, I gave up for a while. I drowned myself in alcohol. I became reckless. Too many times, I came dangerously close to ending my own life. I lost sight of myself so completely that I started to believe the darkness was not something I was passing through, but something I was destined to become. But even then, some buried part of me was still a fighter in the dark, bloodied and blind, refusing to fully disappear.

But things have changed.

I was fortunate enough to have an epiphany. My truth. Not a borrowed truth. Not something handed to me by someone else. Mine.

I no longer merely accept myself. I appreciate myself. I see the wonderful man I am. The resilient son-of-a-bitch. Strange. Cerebral. Aloof. Intellectually restless. Mysterious in ways I used to mistake for defects. I understand now that I was never broken in the way I believed I was. I was becoming. I was surviving. I was carrying a boy inside me who still believed in beauty, even when the man around him had all but given up.

And now, I am looking for you again.

I hope you are still out there. I hope I can still find you.

It has been rough. I have seen a lot. I am war-torn, bruised, and beaten in places no one can see. But somehow, beneath all of that, I am still that ever-optimistic boy. The one intimately connected to this world in a strange and beautiful way. The one who felt too much, noticed too much, hoped too much, and carried a void he did not know how to name.

That void entered my soul on a school bus when I was fourteen.

I have lived with it ever since.

There has been so much life between then and now. So much damage. So much confusion. So many things that, if told plainly, would sound unfathomable. And yet here I am. Not only alive, but in a good place. In many ways, the best place I have ever been. I am content. I am grounded. I am clear.

But the void remains.

Even when I tried not to think about you, I thought about you.

I tried to force others into being you. I tried to make them fit a shape they were never meant to hold. I settled when I should not have settled. I wrecked what I did not understand. I isolated. I performed a slow burn into what I believed was my destiny, convinced that eventually I would become the unfathomable thing I feared most.

And when someone came close to being you, I pushed her away.

Not because she lacked beauty.

Because I was not ready to be seen by it.

I carried too much shame. I saw myself as broken, unworthy, unfinished. So I did not truly pursue you. I could not. Not honestly. Not with both feet on the ground. Not with an open heart. Not as the man you deserved.

But I know better now.

I know I deserve you.

And I know you deserve me, too.

Not the performance. Not the wreckage. Not the man trying to outrun himself. You deserve me in my humility. In my peace. In my strange hope. In my hard-earned tenderness. In the truth I fought like hell to find.

So I am writing to you again.

I am still here.

I am still looking.

And this time, I am not looking for you because I need you to save me.

I am looking for you because I finally know I am worth finding.