# Self-Retrospection I look back at myself the way one regards a stranger met once on a crowded street— a face half-remembered, a gesture caught in peripheral light. Who was that boy who believed in the permanence of things? Who spoke in absolutes, who thought love was a contract signed in blood and starlight? I see him now, distant, the way a man sees his reflection in still water he will never touch again— accurate, but somehow false. The years have made a palimpsest of me. Each season scraped away a layer, each wound rewrote what lay beneath. I am neither the author nor the original text. Sometimes I wonder if this looking back is honesty or just another vanity— another way of saying: *I have changed, therefore I have lived.* But perhaps that's enough. To know yourself as a becoming, not a fixed thing. To meet your own eyes across time and recognize both stranger and kin.