Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

by Aspen Matis

I didn’t yet understand that the longer you look at something beautiful, the less you see it.

Of course, the idea of simply and completely vacating a life—leaving behind all responsibilities, debts, and troubles—is a little exciting. And there is real benefit to new adventure and to fresh space, solo. Time and tangible distance can give a person the opportunity to think with sharper lucidity—unfiltered and undirected by the thoughts of everybody else. But “escaping” via complete and total bailing to “find” oneself can also be a mode of withdrawing from the world—seductive, but ultimately cyclic.