THE PEOPLE I STILL HAVE SOFTNESS FOR

Letter 022 NEW

I Remember Exactly Where We Were.

There are people you remember by how they left. I remember you as the person who once saw me in the morning light.

I remember exactly where we were.

Not just once.

Everywhere.

I remember my place first.

My kitchen.

My bedroom.

The morning light.

We had only reconnected twelve hours earlier.

Reconnected.

That's an important word.

Because I didn't meet you that night.

I met you when I was thirteen.

We were kids.

Homeschooled for gymnastics together, which is such a specific little origin story that sometimes even I can't believe it's ours.

You knew a version of me that existed before almost everything I've written about here.

Before my marriage.

Before my divorce.

Before either of us had any idea we'd someday end up lying beside each other trying to understand what exactly had just happened.

So when twelve hours felt strangely familiar, maybe that's because they weren't really twelve hours.

There were years hiding underneath them.

You remembered me.

The injuries. The knee braces. The way I made you laugh.

Things I didn't know you'd kept.

And suddenly I was learning that somewhere inside the adult standing in front of me was the kid who had noticed me all those years ago.

Maybe that's why it didn't feel like meeting someone.

It felt like finding someone.

You were lying there trying to be reasonable.

Trying not to assume anything.

Trying to decide whether you should stay or leave.

And then I came back into the room.

You told me later that whatever debate had been happening in your head just stopped.

You didn't want to leave.

I remember that.

I remember lying there with you.

I remember how strangely normal it felt for something that should have felt completely insane.

You told me running your fingers through my hair made you feel calm.

That it had been a while since you'd felt calm like that.

I remember how much that meant to me.

Because I felt it too.

At ease.

That's the phrase I used.

I was glad you felt at ease there.

With me.

I remember you talking about the morning light.

You said watching me walk from the kitchen to the bedroom looked like something out of a movie.

You told me I looked beautiful.

You told me you felt lucky.

And because apparently neither of us knew how to experience a normal amount of emotion, we kept talking about it afterward.

The light.

The room.

The way it felt to wake up there.

The first deep breath we took together when I came back to bed.

You said you'd never forget it.

Neither did I.

But that's not the only place I remember.

Because then came spring.

And I spent so much of it with you.

At your place.

While somewhere else, another part of my life was ending.

I was getting divorced.

Even writing those two things beside each other feels strange.

I was losing one life while spending my days inside another.

And you were there in the middle of it.

Not theoretically.

Not as some person I occasionally texted while everything fell apart.

I was with you.

I slept beside you.

I woke up beside you.

There were mornings and evenings and completely unremarkable hours in between.

That's the stuff I miss most, which feels unfair.

Not some giant romantic moment.

The ordinary parts.

Being in the same room without needing the room to be interesting.

Lying beside you.

Laughing.

Talking about absolutely nothing.

Learning the little rhythms of your place.

Watching a day happen around us.

For a while, your home became somewhere I could exist while mine was changing underneath me.

And you told me you felt calm with me.

That mattered more than I knew how to tell you.

Because I felt calm with you too.

During one of the least calm periods of my life.

Maybe that's why those places got lodged inside me.

They weren't just where we fell in love.

They were where I could stop thinking for a minute.

Where divorce paperwork and endings and everything I was supposed to figure out could exist somewhere outside the room.

Where I could just be with you.

And God, I loved being with you.

That's the uncomplicated sentence underneath all the complicated ones.

I loved being with you.

You told me you'd fallen for me.

You told me I was amazing.

You told me knowing me had changed what you thought the rest of your life could look like.

You told me I'd changed what you believed you were capable of.

You told me you loved me.

And I believed you.

I loved you too.

I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with the fact that somebody can say those things—mean them, maybe—and still disappear.

Because after you ghosted me, I did what people do when they're given an ending with no explanation.

I investigated the beginning.

I went back through everything looking for evidence that I had misunderstood.

Maybe I made it bigger than it was.

Maybe I imagined the closeness.

Maybe I mistook comfort for commitment.

Maybe I heard forever where you only meant right now.

Except there you are.

In the memories.

In the messages.

In your own words.

Remembering the same things I remember.

Giving meaning to the same tiny moments.

I wasn't alone in what I thought was happening.

I need to remember that.

Because your silence made me question something your presence had once made feel obvious.

There was an us.

Whatever happened afterward doesn't get to erase that.

You ghosting me doesn't get to travel backward in time and make that morning a lie.

It doesn't get to take the light out of the room.

It doesn't get to change the way you looked at me.

It doesn't get to erase how calm we both said we felt.

It doesn't get to make me stupid for believing something you were standing there believing with me.

And now there are two kinds of places that remember you.

Mine.

And yours.

At my place, I can still picture that first morning.

At yours, I can remember the spring.

The strange season where my old life was ending and I genuinely thought something new was beginning.

I don't know what your place feels like without me in it.

That's yours to know.

But I know what mine feels like without you.

Mostly normal.

That's almost the weirdest part.

The kitchen kept being a kitchen.

The bedroom kept being a bedroom.

Morning kept showing up through the windows.

Life is rude like that.

Eventually a room stops looking like the place where something important happened and goes back to being where you charge your phone.

But every once in a while—the light hits correctly.

A song comes on.

Something reminds me of spring.

And there you are.

Not the person who disappeared.

Not yet.

The person who stayed.

The person who told me he felt calm.

The person I could lie beside while one life was ending and somehow believe another one might be starting.

That's the version of you I miss so much.

And maybe that's what makes this harder than simply missing a person.

I miss where I was when I had you.

I miss my place when you were in it.

I miss your place when I was in it.

I miss that spring.

I miss waking up and not knowing yet that someday I'd be trying to understand how someone who had become part of my everyday life could become completely absent from it.

I remember exactly where we were.

My place.

Your place.

A gymnastics gym when we were thirteen.

A spring years later when my marriage was ending.

Somehow, you exist on both sides of almost my entire adult life.

Maybe that's why losing you never felt like losing someone I'd only recently loved.

I wasn't grieving a few months.

I was grieving someone who could remember a version of me almost nobody in my life now ever knew.

Someone I met before I knew what heartbreak was.

Someone I somehow found again after I'd learned far too much about it.

And for a while, in the middle of one of the biggest endings of my life,

you felt like somewhere I could stay.