LOST !

Once upon a heavy dusk, when the sky was painted with tired blues and forgotten gold, a simple boy stood on the edge of a field he couldn’t name. His name was Nilo, and he was not lost in the world — no, the world was where it had always been. But he was lost from his own mind, far from the shores of his own soul.

People often said he was quiet. “That boy don’t talk much,” they’d whisper. But silence wasn’t his choice — it was his cage. He didn’t remember when it started. Maybe it was the day his father left, or maybe when the laughter in his house grew thin like old paint. Or maybe he was just born with a mind too soft for the world's sharp edges. Either way, Nilo walked with his eyes down and heart in his shoes.

They said he was “just a simple boy.” But inside him lived a chaos that didn’t speak any language. The days passed like ghosts. He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream. He just... stopped being found.

Then, one morning, something cracked.

It wasn’t dramatic. No lightning or earthquake. Just a bird — bright, yellow, ridiculous — landed on his shoulder while he was sitting on the bench at the edge of nowhere. It chirped, once, like it knew something.

He looked at it. Really looked.

And for the first time in a long while, something inside him whispered: Go.

So he did.

He didn’t pack a bag. Didn't say goodbye. He just walked. Past the bench. Past the town. Past the roads where memories clung like cobwebs.

The world beyond was strange. People danced without music. Old women read poetry to trees. A man with one leg taught him how to balance on rocks and told him, “Losing something makes space for something else, kid.”

Each town he wandered through gave him a piece of himself back. In one village, he met a painter who showed him how to draw his fears. Nilo painted a crooked mirror and felt his fingers shake. The painter nodded and said, “You’re not broken. You’re layered.”

In a city where everyone wore masks, a girl with freckles and untied shoelaces gave him a notebook. “Write the things you can’t say,” she told him. So he wrote. At first, just nonsense. Then dreams. Then pain. Then hope.

He didn’t know it, but he was becoming.

Months passed. Seasons turned like pages. The wind became a friend. His own footsteps no longer felt like echoes.

One day, he found a little town by the sea. The kind of place where people knew your name before you said it. He settled there. Got a small job fixing boats. Started humming while he worked. Not songs — just sounds. But they were his.

He still had quiet days. Days when the world tilted and everything felt far. But now, he had a toolbox full of things he’d gathered: a yellow feather, a painted mirror, a torn notebook, a smooth stone from the man with one leg, and a smile he had learned to wear without apology.

He knew now that he hadn’t been broken. He had been buried.

And slowly, lovingly, he had dug himself out.

One evening, as the sun melted into the sea, a child from the village asked him, “Mister, where did you come from?”

Nilo smiled and said, “I came from lost.”

The child looked confused. “But you’re here now.”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess I got founded.”

The kid giggled. “That’s not a word!”

Nilo laughed too. “It is now.”

And in that laughter — raw, real, returned — Nilo felt it: the sound of a soul that had wandered long and far, only to find its way back home

Not to where it started.

But to where it was always meant to be.