The problem is that I’ve been looking for something. A piece of writing from that era. One that I can’t seem to find in my computer files. One that I know I had printed out at one point.
It was a story. A play I had written about college. An amusing, melodramatic parody of a Greek tragedy. But it was more than that. It was how I became friends with the people I still call friends today.
I don’t know how it began. I don’t know why I shared. I don’t even recall who I shared it with. I didn’t feel a particularly strong bond with anyone at the time. But I had been observing them. I had been interested in them. And I had written a story about them.
And it circulated. People liked it. People now knew that the socially awkward kid who kept to himself was actually interested in them. I had broken through some kind of invisible barrier. I was starting to figure out my place. At least a little.
I don’t know where I’d be right now if I hadn’t written that story. Certainly not in my house, a short walk from where one college friend used to live. Maybe I would have wound up alone and friendless. Or maybe I would have found my wife years ago (as opposed to some TBD point in the future).
Writing that story and sharing it was a decision that shaped my life. In a meta sense, it’s the story of my life.
And I can’t find it anywhere.
If there’s any consolation, it’s that the story has served its cosmic purpose. It did its work and then it went away, like we all must do. But more than that, there is a lesson—one I need to learn now more than ever:
When you create something and share it, your world changes.
Besides, a treasure is never really gone. Just buried.
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