There is a moment, after something ends, when we try to make sense of it by shrinking it..
“It wasn’t real,” we say.. Or: “It was just in my head.”
Not because we believe it, but because it is easier than holding something that existed… and still slipped away..
But not everything that disappears was imagined.. Some things are simply unable to remain.. Not because they lack depth, but because they cannot breathe inside the world we asked them to live in..
We meet people at the wrong time.. We meet them while we are still learning how to be seen, how to stay, how not to run when something feels too close.. And yet, something real still happens.. It happens in the quiet details, in the way your attention softens, in the way a presence becomes familiar faster than it should.. You don’t always notice it while it unfolds, but later, you understand, something in you shifted..
We tend to measure love by its ability to last.. If it didn’t become a life, if it didn’t settle into something stable, something recognizable, we question it.. But maybe that’s where we misunderstand it.. Maybe some forms of love are not meant to stay.. Not because they are fragile, but because they are too subtle to survive the weight of everyday reality.. They don’t always belong in plans, in expectations, in the steady rhythm of a shared life.. They belong somewhere quieter..
And when they leave, they don’t vanish.. They relocate.. Into memory.. Into imagination.. Into the soft spaces of your mind where they remain untouched by everything that couldn’t hold them..
And you carry them differently.. Not as something broken.. Not as something unfinished.. But as something that was complete in its own way, even if it didn’t last long enough to prove it.
So no, not everything that leaves you was an illusion.. Some things are real, precisely because they couldn’t stay..
And maybe the most honest thing you can do is not to deny them, but to let them exist exactly as they were..
Real..
Brief..
And quietly transformative..
Tatiana,
PS. For a very special Christmas, still existing somewhere, the way I remember it..
Why today? should you ask.. in the end of March.. I don’t really have an answer..
Only this quiet feeling, that some memories don’t follow seasons.. They don’t wait for winter to return.. They don’t need the cold, or the lights, or the music.. They arrive unannounced, on a warm Sunday morning, in the middle of something ordinary,
as if time briefly forgets where it’s supposed to be.. And suddenly… there it is again.. The rain on the pavement.. The reflections trembling under streetlights.. The feeling of walking beside something real without needing to name it..
It doesn’t ask for anything.. It doesn’t try to stay.. It just… appears.. Like a place you once lived in without knowing you would have to leave.. And maybe that’s why it comes back now, not to bring you there again, but to remind you that it existed.. That it was yours, even if only for a moment the world couldn’t hold..
And somewhere, in a version of time that doesn’t move forward.. it still is..
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