The Day I Met Myself

The Day I Met Myself

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon, the kind that muffles the world in a soft gray silence. I had planned to spend the day cleaning out the attic, a task I had postponed for years. What I didn’t expect was that between the dust-covered boxes and forgotten memories, I would meet someone I hadn’t seen in a long time — myself.

The attic smelled of old wood and faded paper. I pulled open a box marked "High School" and began sifting through it. There were trophies from long-forgotten competitions, crumpled essays, and a journal I barely remembered writing. The leather cover was cracked, and my name was scrawled in the corner with a childish hand.

Curious, I sat down and opened it.

Page after page, I read the thoughts of a younger me — a teenager who dreamed of becoming a writer, who feared not being enough, who believed love could fix everything. There was a raw honesty in those pages that I hadn’t felt in years. I had grown older, busier, and more careful with my emotions. But the person in those words was open, eager, and unafraid of feeling deeply.

As I read, it felt like a conversation. I remembered her — the way she used to laugh with her whole body, cry without shame, and speak with passion. She hadn’t yet learned how to suppress her dreams in favor of stability or how to say “I’m fine” when she wasn’t. Somewhere along the way, I had let her slip through my fingers.

And then I saw it. A letter addressed: “To the Me I’ll Be One Day.”

“I hope you didn’t forget me. I hope you still write, even if it’s just in secret. I hope you didn’t let the world tell you who to be. And if you did, it’s okay. Just come find me. I’ll be waiting.”

I stared at that letter for a long time, my eyes stinging.

In that quiet attic, with the rain tapping gently on the roof, I felt time fold in on itself. The girl I used to be wasn’t gone. She was buried under bills, job titles, failed relationships, and all the masks I wore to fit in. But she was still there — waiting for me to remember.

So I wrote back. Right there, on a blank page in that same journal.

“I’ve missed you. I stopped writing for a while, convinced that dreams were only for the young. I let people’s expectations steer my life more than I’d like to admit. But reading your words brought me back. I want to find that fire again. I want to meet you — not as someone I left behind, but as someone I’m becoming again.”

When I finished writing, something in me shifted. It was subtle — like the first light of dawn after a long night — but it was real.

That was the day I met myself. Not in a mirror, but in a memory. Not in who I had become, but in who I had always been beneath the noise. It wasn’t dramatic or loud, but it was powerful. It reminded me that we don’t have to be someone new to find ourselves — sometimes, we just have to remember who we were before the world told us to be someone else.

And in remembering, we come home.