I, ME and MYSELF

 

I, ME and MYSELF

The life at the City Park had no schedule, no entry, and no exit. It was just a floor of infinite glass reflecting a sky that refused to turn dark. I sat there, my pulse thrumming in my ears, anchored to a wooden bench that felt more real than the ground beneath it. This was not a place where everything was rushing, it was a place for reckoning. I had spent thirty years running from the man I was supposed to be, constructing a life out of distractions and noise, but here, the silence was a vacuum. I was waiting for him to arrive, and for the first time in my life, I had nowhere left to hide. I had always known we would have to meet eventually. It’s a strange thing, isn't it? To live inside a body and yet feel like you have locked the rightful owner in the basement. I checked my watch, but the hands were not moving. Time here did not tick, it just drifted.

Then, I saw him.

He was not a younger version of me, nor was he older. He was just... me. He wore a sweater which I had thrown away years ago because someone told me the color did not suit me. He walked with a stride I recognized from the old movies - unfiltered, heavy-footed, and entirely unapologetic.

My heart performed a somersault which was a slow, painful roll in my chest. I wanted to run away, but my shadow was already stitched to his across the glass floor. As he came closer, I felt that familiar, icy dread. I knew what was coming. I knew the one question that had been rotting in the back of my mind like a fresh fruit left in a lunchbox in the summer.

He sat down next to me. He did not look angry. He just looked tired, the way you look after a very long walk through a very beautiful forest. For a long time, we just watched the horizon change from amber to a deep, bruised purple. "You look like you have seen a ghost," he said. His voice was my voice, but without the practiced "professional" edge which I had spent a decade honing. It was lower, grainier, and infinitely more honest. "I feel like I am looking at one," I whispered. I kept my eyes fixed on my polished shoes. I had polished them this morning until they shone, a habit that I had picked up to prove to the world that I had my life together.

"You have been busy," he noted, nudging my shiny shoe with his scuffed sneaker. "A lot of meetings. A lot of lists. A lot of making sure everyone else is comfortable while you sit in rooms with the air conditioning turned too low." I nodded in agreement, the lump in my throat growing until it felt like I had swallowed a stone. This was it. The moment I had been afraid of. I turned to him, my eyes stinging, and finally let the words out.

"Where were you?" I asked, my voice cracking. "Where were you all this time?"

I expected him to shout. I expected him to list every hobby I had abandoned, every dream I had traded for "stability," and every time I had silenced my own intuition to please a stranger. I expected an allegation.

Instead, he reached out and took my hand. His skin was warm. "I was not anywhere else," he said softly. "I was right here. I was in the pauses between your breaths when you were too stressed to think. I was in the songs you hummed when you thought no one was listening." 

"But I left you," I argued, the tears finally spilling over. "I ignored you. I grew up and I left you behind because I thought you were too loud, too messy, and too much for the world to handle."

He leaned back, looking up at the purple sky. "You did not leave me. You just put me in your pocket for safekeeping. You thought you had to be someone else to survive the 'real world,' and honestly? You did a pretty good job of surviving. You got us through some really hard years."

The "Where was I?" I had feared was not a question of abandonment. It was a question of endurance. He had not been lost, but he had been waiting for the environment to be safe enough for him to come back out. "I'm sorry," I sobbed, burying my face in my hands. "I am so sorry I made you stay in the dark for so long."

He did not tell me it was okay, not in that dismissive way people do. He just put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. We sat there for an eternity or a second, it was impossible to tell.

"The thing about meeting yourself," he whispered, "is that you don't need to apologize for the ways you learned to stay alive. But now that we are both here... maybe we could try being 'too much' together?"

I looked up and saw some children forming a train their arms entangled in each other. Seeing me seeing them, they stopped as if the train had arrived at the station. The train was a colorful, clattering thing, covered in stickers and smelling like rain and old books. It was full of life and zest.

I stood up, and for the first time in years, I did not check my watch. I did not look at my reflection to see if my hair was perfect. I just reached out, took his hand, and together, we hopped onto the train.