There’s an important morning coming. It may come tomorrow, or twenty years from tomorrow, but it’s coming. It’s the morning you wake up and realize that who you were has gone missing. You’ll look in the mirror while you wash your face, and you’ll look for him. Top right, top left, bottom right, bottom left, and center, but he isn’t there. *Maybe the mirror is broken*, you’ll say and move on. While brewing your coffee, you’ll use more coffee beans than usual, or fewer. When pouring the coffee, you’ll add sugar when you didn’t use to, or you’ll skip the sugar when you never used to go without.
You’ll get dressed, putting your pants on the wrong leg first, and you’ll find the pants themselves are not the kind you used to wear. You’ll button your shirt, and that too, is different. At this point, you’ll have had enough. Something is wrong. Something is different. *Where is he?* you’ll wonder. *He isn’t here.* You’ll get to your desk, and you’ll pick up your journal, flipping to yesterday’s entry. The handwriting is different. So is the format.
You’ll rush to the bookshelf and pull an old journal from years ago, and thank God, you’ll breathe a sigh of relief. There it is. The handwriting you know, and in that moment you’ll also know that you didn’t imagine him and that he definitely is missing. You’ll look back to your desk and see a framed photo. The man in the photo doesn’t look like who you were. He looks more like the man from the mirror earlier. He looks healthy; his eyes twinkle. His beard and hair are different. *He looks good*, you’ll conclude, *but he’s not who I was. What happened to who I was?*
But you know exactly what happened to him, you’d just never considered it. All this time you spent becoming who your are, bringing this vision to life, you never considered what would happen to who you were. In order for the new you to come, the old you must go. And the part that hurts is that the old you wasn’t all bad. Some of him was brilliant, but those brilliant parts are too close to the terrible parts, so they went when he did.
You didn’t trust yourself to keep them alive, because however good they felt, they still felt like *him*. So you avoided them, consciously or otherwise. You’ll realize that you haven’t played your guitar in a while, because music was always *his* thing, not yours.
That day you’ll realize you lost someone. Someone who knew you better than anyone, someone closer than anybody else. You’ll look around the room and notice a bunch of his stuff. His books, his art, and his old guitar. Maybe you’ll get rid of them, and maybe you won’t. Either way, you’ll realize that someday, someone will look around this same room and wonder what happened to you. When who you were went missing, who you are took his place. And who you are is already becoming who you’ll be.