They say he "lost himself." But that is a gentle lie. A self is not a set of keys you misplace in the couch. A self is a house with many rooms—rooms for grief, for joy, for shame, for love. He did not lose the house. He began to sell it, one brick at a time.
What replaced the house was a terminal. An airport lounge of the damned. No past, no future, only the next five minutes. He became a ghost who still breathed. He walked past his own reflection in shop windows and saw a stranger wearing his face like a hostage. The Boy Who Lost Himself To Drugs BETTER
First went the room of ambition. The scholarships, the half-written novel, the guitar with the broken string—he traded them for the quiet hum of the next hit. They say he "lost himself