Once again, I find myself trapped on the border between the past and the present. The past is beyond retrieval, and so I begin placing my hopes in cards, imagining that one day I might reclaim everything I lost to those years of ignorance.

My days blur together in disorder. There is so much I need to do, yet I keep sinking into sleep. In my dreams, I am not myself, and the world is not this world. There, I don't have to stare into tomorrow—or yesterday—with empty eyes. My loves and grudges are placed in another universe, hidden inside a jade box of deep green, tucked beneath a heavy bed. In my dreams, I can even forget my addiction to that boy. It comes over me like a craving for cigarettes.

Then, day by day, I begin to lose my memory, just as I spent four years losing myself in smoke. I slowly found my place among other people, only to forget the self who had existed for my own sake. I searched without end. Surely what I saw in life was more than those drifting specks of color. Never before had I found myself so unable to speak, so unable to wake remembering anything except him—or her—or the version of myself that belonged to him. Over those four years, the boy and I gradually turned against one another, until we became strangers standing on opposite sides.

It is time for me to go and find myself again. This time, for my own sake.