The Version Of Us

The one we leave behind.

There is certain moment in our lives where we have to let a part of ourselves go. Like the skin of a snake, like a shell that is no longer of use. Beautiful, shiny, sometimes broken. We have to leave it behind.

Missing it is part of the dance, of the ritual of life. Growing up we feel we are making our cozy home inside ourselves but the truth is that tides shift, the earth tremblers and skies roar.

There is no finish line to “growing up”, but there is a certain moment that everything turns still and you just observe: back, present, forward. Goals met, goals left, goals to be. Your family tree feels like human beings instead of gods and monsters, and your friends pick you up where they left you. Sometimes for dead, most of the times to fend for yourself, and a for others… the table turn and you are left to lead.

No one asks to be born, or to keep growing in this world. It’s the hand that’s been dealt, and when you realize that all the mistakes made both nurture and come back to haunt you, you understand what all the writers were talking about.

What all the dead poets, the haunted artists, the heavenly sculptors — what they all saw and felt.

You grasp how everything you grew up to was created. How that art was crafted. With pain, with tears, and sweat. With blood, passion and joy. It simply is the art of being human. The art of growing up and pulling the thorns from your skin with your bare hands.

This sudden shift — like an earthquake on a sunny day — does not come for free. To move on, to become someone, you must let something go. Maybe it’s a relationship that needs air to breathe. The part of you that clings to it. Maybe is trading something given to something burning inside.

Those skins we shed are not lost.

There is a reason to who we were then.

This is the reason to who we are now.