I will not begin with once upon a time. That phrase belongs to stories, and I am not telling a story. What I am writing is only a reflection, and reflections rarely care about beginnings.

People love being appreciated. Some even feel wounded when it is absent. As for me, I have come to think appreciation is a lie. Do not be surprised — I tend to think most things are. People come and go, and that is ordinary. But coming back is different. A return is rarely innocent. Either fortune brings someone back, or necessity does.

In my experience, people return because they can still use you, or because you still offer them something. That is usually the reason. And yet, despite these suspicions, there is something about you that resists them.

I respect you. I admit this reluctantly, because the evidence for such respect is insufficient. I do not know you well enough to justify such respect, and what little I do know should not logically be enough. Respect, without clear cause, persisting like an error that refuses correction.

Very few people know anything about my life. Even fewer have heard it from me directly. Apart from my family, no one truly knows it—and yet you do, at least a little. I never intended to tell you these things. In fact, I rarely speak about them at all. It is not secrecy that prevents me; it is simply a lack of interest in revisiting them. Yet with you it happened differently.

Without planning it, almost without noticing it, I found myself speaking freely, telling pieces of my story as though the words had quietly decided for themselves that you were the one meant to hear them. Until recently, I believed I only discovered things about myself in the laboratory of solitude or deep sadness. Those were the conditions I understood. But something unusual occurred: I discovered something new about myself simply by being around you. It was a small, quiet discovery, but it was real. For that, strangely enough, I am grateful. The difficulty now is naming the feeling.

Is it admiration? Respect? Appreciation? Perhaps even something deeper? I do not know. I have written many things before and rarely struggled to express an emotion, yet this one refuses to cooperate. Either it cannot be expressed, or perhaps I understand it too well and prefer not to admit it.

When you spoke about the future you are building for yourself , I felt something quiet — a wish to be part of it, even knowing I probably cannot be. Still, an update would mean something to me. Even if our paths eventually go in completely different directions, hearing about your progress would still feel worthwhile. Most people do not like the thought of others surpassing them. It unsettles their pride. I find that I feel the opposite. I sincerely hope that you become better than me in every possible way—even if, in your life, I remain only a minor and unimportant figure.

This may be a goodbye in advance. Or, perhaps, it is merely a greeting addressed to a future we haven't entered yet.

I say this because I see something familiar in the way you pursue opportunity. Our goals may not be identical, but the way you move toward them—the the way you spoke about it without asking permission from doubt , the willingness to act when the moment appears—is something I recognize and respect.

Yes, this is a reflection—because I saw myself in you, honest to a fault, yet capable of subtle lies, prone to complaint, yet never giving up on the future. You carry responsibilities that few even know, burdens that do not shape your face but shape your resolve. I saw in you the tension between doubt and determination, the quiet struggle to persist when the world might prefer you to surrender. In that, I recognized myself, as if looking into a mirror that both comforts and unsettles.

I hope that it succeeds. Truly. If the future behaves the way it sometimes does, in that strange and unpredictable way, perhaps what I hope for will become something difficult to explain — that may involve you and me in ways neither of us expects.

Until then—

see you soon, future you.