Hello 27, where do I look for you?

I look back. Most of the time, I look back and I think of being younger.

Being young and always being right. There’s nothing I didn’t know. I could argue the dawn back into the dusk.

The hands I’ve held and the secrets I’ve kept. How it felt to mean different things to different people.

It seems like the older we get the less we know. There is no revelation. Except the one.

The one where we realize that the more we see, the more we question.

Every year ends with a question mark and rarely, if we’re in luck, one begins with an answer.

I look back. The thin lines I’ve walked and the second chances with scribbled zeros next to them.

The mistakes that I thought would burn the most looking back. The confrontations I feared.

Now, they don’t hurt.

The fake laughs to jokes I never understood. Suppressed laughs to jokes only I understood.

Staying a night longer in a place I didn’t belong. Leaving the places I loved too soon.

Yelling when I could’ve protested in silence. Swallowing a broken voice too often.

Holding my head down to an insult. Sleeping with an itch inside.

I never thought these would be the moments that would bother me most when I look back.

But they are. Because the mistakes, the confrontations – at least they are things left done. Not undone.

And eyes. What is left of those who have become strangers. The looks inside the eyes I once filled. They remain.

The eyes that we have left empty even just for a little while.

And we go on to fill other eyes. Each time with the fear of seeing a look we can’t live with.

Looking back, we sometimes live out of fear of rewriting what we left behind with the same words.

And then there’s this year. The year that is taxing me for looking forward.

I have a small stash left and I won’t use it up on projections.

Looking back and looking forward, moments, eyes, and regrets are hanging on walls of empty hallways. I’m running to the very end of it.

And then there’s him. The only look I’ve seen for a while. Those eyes I’m filling. All the others I’ve left empty now make sense.

Now, I can look up to see what I have here right now. What I’ve left behind doesn’t matter. What I’m leaving forward can wait.

Now, I can look to my side to see what is next to me. To the hand I’m holding here.

And I can spin endlessly just in this moment.