ghosts in the rearview

sometimes i wonder when i stopped being me. or maybe i wonder if this is me now, if the girl who used to get it done, no matter how late she started, is gone for good. i hope not. i don’t want her to be.

You love me when it fits neatly into your day, like an extra twenty minutes before you have to leave for somewhere else, like a song you only listen to when you’re already in the car. You show up when you’re in the mood, when the air is soft and you have nothing better to do, when I’m easy to reach, when my name feels light on your tongue instead of heavy in your chest. And I let you. I let you knock on my door at 11 p.m. after ignoring me all week, and I make you your favourite iced coffee and act like I haven’t been sitting here wondering what I did wrong. I’ve learned your patterns- how you answer fast when you’re bored but leave me on read when you’re with someone else, how you remember I exist when something reminds you of me but forget to remember me without a trigger. You’ve never been here for the hard parts, for the days I can’t stand myself or the nights when the walls feel too close, but you’ve been here for the good light, for the warm skin, for the easy laugh. And still, every time, I’ve opened the door like it’s the first time you knocked.

-George Orwell, 1984

So even if my skin forgets the way you touched me, I never will, and that is the most beautiful and heartbreaking truth because the memory of you is etched beneath the surface, deeper than the flesh and further than time, living like a silent ghost in every part of me that you once held and it is this quiet tragedy, the body’s betrayal to forget what the soul can never release, and that is the ache I carry every day, the kind that lingers in the warmth of my skin and the cold spaces of my mind, a reminder that some touches fade but the memories burn forever.

I’m entering my second year now, and somehow everything feels different- not in the way that you can point at and say, this is what’s changed, but in the way where you just feel it in your bones, like the air around you isn’t quite the same anymore. I just came back to college after the holidays, and every time I leave home for this… second home, it hits harder and harder that things will never be the way they were. That slow, safe rhythm of being home for good, of knowing I’d be back in the same place with the same people, doesn’t exist anymore. My friends here, they make it better, they make it lighter- I laugh with them, I make plans with them, I stay up too late with them- but still, the nostalgia comes creeping in at the quietest moments. I’ll be walking back from class, or making coffee, and suddenly I’m back in my old room, talking to my sister in the dark after school, neither of us willing to sleep yet, just stretching the night out so we wouldn’t have to say goodnight. I miss her so fucking much. I think about how she’s at that age where I remember feeling like I desperately needed someone older to talk to, but she doesn’t have me there anymore. I’m here, caught up in lectures and deadlines and the noise of college, and she’s in that small town, with exam pressure and a million teenage thoughts bouncing around her head. I don’t know if she misses me the way I miss her- maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t- but I know she probably feels the gap. And every time I pack my bags to come back here, I can’t help but think about how home isn’t something you live in forever. It’s something you visit, and each visit reminds you more and more that you’ve already left.

and maybe i’ll forget more of it as time goes on. maybe it’ll all fade like party lights the morning after. but july 29th? i don’t think that one’s going anywhere.

i was 13 when i moved, and everything felt too unfamiliar, too wide, too echoey. i didn’t say it out loud back then, but i was lonely in the kind of way that eats at the soft parts of you. i remember this one night — it was raining, i think, or maybe that’s just how memory makes everything feel — and i was home alone, too new to the town to feel safe, too small to feel brave, and then you knocked on my door like the universe decided i’d had enough quiet for one night. i didn’t know who you were yet, just some boy from the building maybe, but you smiled like we already knew each other and somehow, things didn’t feel so heavy anymore. that’s how i met you — not with a bang, but with a knock that didn’t feel like an intrusion, more like an arrival. and you made things feel less like survival and more like living. we were kids pretending we weren’t. and then somewhere in the middle of growing up, we stumbled into love like we were borrowing it, like we were trying it on just to see if it fit. and for a while, it did. maybe not perfectly. maybe with frayed edges. but it was ours. and even after it wasn’t, we stayed. because you weren’t just someone i loved — you were my person. for five years. five whole years of inside jokes and sharp silences and knowing looks and whatever that thing was we never had the language for. and now you’re in a new city, and i’m still here, walking past places that feel like they should still have our shadows. it’s weird. you’re not in my life anymore, but you’re still in it — in the songs, in the phrases i still use, in the parts of myself that wouldn’t exist without you. i wonder if you still think about it. not us, exactly — just the time. the growing up. the becoming. i’m sorry for how i treated you after we ended — i was angry, not just at you but at how small i felt when i was with you, at how the love we built started to feel like a room with no windows. i needed air, and instead of asking for it gently, i tore down the whole house. but even then, even after the fights and the silences and the way i’d flinch at your name, you still spoke to me with softness, with that strange kind of unconditional love that i didn’t know how to meet halfway. i see it now — how it was your first time loving someone like that, how you held on too tightly because you didn’t know what else to do, and i wish i had told you then that i understood, that it wasn’t all your fault, that we were just two kids trying to love with hands too shaky and hearts too full of things we hadn’t healed from. you loved me in the only way you knew how, and even if it hurt, it was still love. and i’m sorry i couldn’t say that when it mattered most. i hope you’re happy in ways you never told anyone you wanted to be. and i hope when you think of me — if you ever do — it’s not with bitterness, but with that soft kind of warmth that sits in your chest quietly. like a light that never really goes out.