The sky is gray, and the air is cold. I shiver as I wrap my arms around myself as a shield from the frigid wind. The trees sway and shake in the wind, and patches of blue peek through a storm-colored sky. The breaks in the clouds let thin rays of sun shine through, illuminating small areas and painting the world in highlights of gold. It is evening, and I know that it will not be long before I must return home.

I wish I didn’t have to go back.

I wander down countless streets, and though I don’t walk far, I do not stop moving. Each time I turn down a new street -- and see another place I have never seen before -- I can’t help but laugh, or smile, or twirl in a circle, because it is not often that I get the chance to not know where I am.

Rarely have I heard of someone else trying to get lost, yet I have done so countless times. Every time I come to a place where the road forks, I refuse to spend more than a second thinking about where to go, and I turn whichever way the wind takes me. It is hard for me to find a street I have never walked down, and when I find one, I invariably choose to follow it. If I continue to wander, I will often find myself returning to the same place.

It is difficult to stay lost.

As often as I can, I like to walk. I simply wander around my neighborhood, which makes it challenging to find a place I have not yet been. I wish to get lost. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as well. I yearn for complete lack of direction and the freedom to simply keep moving.

It is peaceful, to lose yourself. Often my thoughts get misplaced, but I have never been wholly somewhere completely new. I often imagine myself wandering far off and never returning. What would it be like, to stay lost forever? What would it be like, to never be found? I will probably never know.

I don’t know what I’m writing or where this essay is going. I figure that if I keep typing without stopping I will get somewhere eventually; but I don’t know this to be true. In a way, it is the same philosophy I use when trying to get lost. If I keep moving forward, keep stepping one foot in front of the other, typing one word after another, I will get somewhere. Even if I’m trying to express an idea I don’t understand; even if I am searching for a place that does not exist, I must keep going. I may not reach my intended destination, but I’ll get somewhere if I keep moving forward.

When attempting to lose oneself, it is generally better to be alone; only in solitude could you lose yourself completely. However, to simply become physically lost, and see places you’ve never seen, you may wander with someone else. Only once have I tried to get lost with another.

It was not until I was eleven years old that I first tried to get lost. This first time I was not alone; it was not even my idea to get lost. I was with two of my friends, hiking. Bored with the group and the teacher’s requirements, one of my friends suggested that we try to find another trail and depart from the group. She did not say that we should run away. Simply that we should be lost. We three tried to separate from the small group of people with whom we were at camp, but it was a little trail and we did not have time to stray very far. And so we were not lost. Disappointed, we rejoined with the rest of the camp, but since then I have wanted to find a way to lose myself. Since then, I have tried many times to lead myself astray to an unknown place.

But it is very hard.

It is hard to find yourself in a place you’ve never been before. It is hard to let yourself into the unknown, or to even find where that is. You can take a turn down one street, keep moving forward down another, past houses and trees. But it is hard to see all of that as new.

I am thirteen now, and I do not try as hard to get lost. There are things to do, so many things to do, and things to find and fix and get right. There is no time for losing anything. But recently, I have fallen into a sort of depression. My optimism and view of light has narrowed, and nothing seems to matter. My motivation has disappeared. Sitting in my room one day, my mother noticed my sadness and suggested I take a walk. Alone, she said. Just wander.

And at first, I groaned. Exercise is her cure for everything. But the idea sounded nice. And so, with nothing better to do but drown in my thoughts, I went.

Alone, I thought. Just wander.

I grabbed my phone and a jacket and started to walk. It surprised me how many twists and turns there were in my neighborhood, and I wandered on to back roads and places I had never seen before. Small ponds, frozen and sleeping, caught my eye. I had always thought my neighborhood to be boring. Just streets and houses built in the seventies, everything the same. But ponds, strange houses, back roads and rivers found me. In the end, every road I took lead to the same place. I was lost for minutes at a time, never more, treading in worlds I had never seen until I came to the end of a road and turned on to one I knew.

It often saddens me, to think that everywhere we go is another place we will never see as new again. The longer we are in this world, the more we wander and search for lost, the harder it is to find. With every step we take comes another place in which we will never be lost in again. But, I suppose, things change. Buildings fall and new are built, trees burn down and new ones grow. Leaves fall, the grass browns, and the light grows cold, but spring brings new life.

So maybe we are never set in a place we know, when everything is changing all around us. And it may be true that the peace of lost will not last forever, but the world around us does not let the found to stay for long either.

It now dawns on me that most people would not use the word peaceful to describe the lost. Alone, they might say. Confused. Afraid. Gone. They might be afraid to get lost, and I suppose I am as well. But more than afraid, I am curious. I wonder what I would find, if I just wandered. What I would see, who I would meet. I wonder what I would miss.

When I ask my family about what being lost means to them, they describe being frightened. My mother, an eight or nine-year-old at the time, was lost hiking on a snowy trail with her family. And although they were only a little lost, and only for a few minutes, she describes it as an eternity. Confusion and fright engulfed her and all the trees looked the same; the sky darkened. Her father found the trail, and they made their way back. But she still carries that worry and feeling of panic whenever she’s hiking, even today.

And perhaps being lost really is a thing that most people fear. But, although they describe such panic, they also describe a sense of adventure. Once, in her early twenties while living in Denver, my mother rode for miles and miles on a bike trail, never really knowing where she was going except for the fact that she was heading west. In that place she had never seen before, she saw streams and hills and red-colored rock. There, she found beauty. And that is what I search for whenever I walk out the door.

Days and days I have spent searching for lost. But somehow, this disconnection and beauty refuses to be found.

And yet I keep moving forward. I continue to try to get lost, wandering throughout neighborhoods and burying myself within my thoughts. I turn down one street, follow one thought, which leads to another, and another, until I do not recognize where I am. Though never finding what I’m looking for, the lack of finding altogether, I still yearn for the lost. I still find peace in the small moments of wandering that I find, and joy in the hope that one day I will reach full lost.

And when I am older, I will travel. I will find a way to get lost. But until then, I will continue to wander around my neighborhood and the places I know, searching for unknowns in the places I think I know so well. I will look at the sky, whether it is grey or blue. I will continue to search for the sun behind the clouds and for new roads and paths to follow. And perhaps, one day, I will find what I seek. Wanderlust, I will keep moving.

Just wander.