I searched for you for far longer than you could probably imagine, because this was not something I decided to do one morning, nor was it a curiosity that suddenly appeared. It was a search built from questions, incomplete names, conflicting stories, and doors that often closed before I could even explain why I was knocking. I searched for you the way a hopeful child searches for a favorite toy, inside old boxes, beneath the bed, and in corners where even adults have stopped looking.
I searched for you like a sailor without a map, without a ship, and without any certainty that I would ever reach shore. I had to gather the pieces of a story that had been handed to me already broken, a story in which I asked questions, doubted, cried, and heard “no” more times than I can remember. I swallowed shame that was never mine to carry and endured humiliation simply because, somewhere behind it all, there was still the possibility of finding you. Whenever it seemed there was nothing left for me to do, I began again, and then again, and then once more.
For years, I thought I was searching for you because I wanted to know who you were. Now I understand that I was also searching for a part of myself. I wanted to know where certain gestures and features came from, and why certain questions surfaced whenever I looked in the mirror. I wanted to find the other half of a story I had always felt was incomplete. Perhaps I believed that, by finding you, something inside me would finally fall into place.
Maybe I also held on to the hope that something different could exist beyond what I had known, something warmer and less confusing, or maybe I simply hoped to find someone who would not ask me to be strong before I could be worthy of love.I did not search for you to recover lost time. I always understood that the years could not be recovered and that no conversation could erase an absence. I never expected that sharing blood would somehow teach us how to love one another, but after such a long search, I did imagine I would find curiosity, patience, and a desire to know the person who had spent so many years trying to reach you.
While you did not know I existed, I knew there was someone out there, someone without a clear name, a face, or an address, yet strangely present throughout my life. If there is one thing I learned, it is that an absence can take up an enormous amount of space. It can sit at the table without being invited, appear in photographs and documents, surface in questions at school, and live quietly in the silences of a family. When I was thirteen, I believed I could simply leave, cross a bridge, and ask someone where to find you. For a long time, I remembered that idea with embarrassment, especially the plan I made with my friend to run away and find you. I thought I had been naïve, foolish, and dramatic. I was ashamed of that girl, but life has taught me to look at her differently, because she was never foolish.
She was only trying, with the few tools a child has, to answer a question the adults had left unresolved. She was not dramatic either. The absence was real, the story was incomplete, and there was a part of herself she needed to know, and she did it. She grew up, asked questions, insisted, and found you, but finding you did not mean finding everything she had imagined.
The truth is that endings are sometimes far from happy. They do not always come with answers, embraces, explanations, or even understanding. Sometimes a search ends only when you realize that you have gone as far as you could, perhaps that, too, is a kind of closure.
Knowing that I did not give up, that I did everything within my power, and that I crossed the river even though I had to cross it alone allows me to tell that thirteen-year-old girl that she made it to the other side. She found the person she had been searching for, even if she did not find the place she had imagined beside him. And yes, it hurts, but it also brings a strange kind of peace, because I no longer have to spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I had never tried. So I will keep what was mine in all of this. I will keep the courage it took to try, the years I spent searching, and the moment I finally found you.
But now, I must also learn to let go of the life I imagined would begin after finding you.
