. . .
It’s strange, isn’t it? How people can enter our lives out of nowhere as complete strangers and become some of the most important people we’ll ever know. People who will rearrange our inner landscape before we even realize anything has moved.
We might be walking down the street on a cold November morning and slip into a café. We order our usual, but what’s not usual about that day is the person sitting beneath the neon sign, typing away on their laptop, preoccupied with a life we know nothing about.
Maybe they get up to order their second matcha and brush past us on their way to the counter. Maybe we exchange a few words. At first, it’s an ordinary moment on an ordinary morning. But beneath it, everything is shifting.
And then we go on our first date. We recognize the fluttery sensations in our stomachs, as though something inside us has grown wings. We overanalyze every word before it leaves our mouths, afraid to say the wrong thing, afraid to humiliate ourselves. We jump at the sound of a phone notification, hoping it’s them. We feel sixteen again. It’s funny how love can take us back in time like that.
Little by little, we feel our hearts swelling. We begin to suspect that this feeling is bigger than us, that it could move mountains or end world hunger. We want to give this person everything. We don’t even know what everything means yet. We just want to give it to them.
The world becomes more colorful. It rains, and suddenly we aren’t annoyed by our frizzy manes or the inconvenience of soaked socks. The rain feels enchanted. The rain feels as though it arrived just for us, just for this moment, as we sit in a quaint restaurant warmed by a wood-burning stove, our feet intertwined beneath a white tablecloth.
Even the mail carrier and the person bagging our groceries at Trader Joe’s seem more chipper, as though our love has somehow improved their day, too.
This feeling makes us want to do good things in the world, to help anyone who needs it. With a love like this, why wouldn’t we want to give something back?
Then, we give ourselves permission to dream. We imagine a future. Little shoes by the front door. Tiny versions of the sneakers we wear, made for someone who hasn’t learned to tie them yet.
We know our imaginations are getting ahead of us, but that’s how it goes when we’re falling in love. We can’t help wondering where this might take us. Sometimes, thinking about the person feels almost as exciting as being with them. We replay conversations. We imagine the next time we’ll be together. Even in their absence, we’re enraptured.
Then weeks turn into months. Maybe months turn into years.
There are moments of conflict. We learn how the other person argues, how they withdraw, how they try to repair. Some of the things we thought were adorable become less endearing. The red flags we overlooked on that first date become the things we struggle to accept. We still love them, but reality settles in beside the possibility.
And then one day, they’re gone.
Maybe we saw it coming. Maybe we didn’t. Either way, knowing a relationship is ending doesn’t quite prepare us for waking up in the space it leaves behind. There’s no one beside us in bed. Their toothbrush is missing from the holder. Their jacket no longer hangs beside ours.
Our hearts ache with remembrance and longing, and we wonder: How did I get here? How did this stranger come out of nowhere, begin to mean so much, and then disappear from my life?
It feels a little like borrowing a book from the library and falling in love with the story. We savor every page as we go. We read slowly and intentionally because we don’t want it to be over. Then we’re told our time is up. Someone else is waiting. It’s time to return it. But we weren’t finished. There were so many pages we thought we’d get to read.
We were looking forward to the mundane moments. Maybe we had a few, but we wanted the long haul. The tough days we would find our way through together. Even the heated disagreements over whether to paint the living room eggshell or mustard.
We weren’t only attached to the life we’d shared. We were attached to the life we thought was still ahead of us. And now this person we knew so intimately moves through the world without us. We may never see them again. We may never even speak to them.
Yet we can’t stop thinking about them. They’re on our minds as though our minds have never known another thought.
We try to distract ourselves. We read mystery novels, watch old movies, talk to friends we trust, try new hobbies, bury ourselves in work. We remind ourselves of the freedoms we have now. We can cook whatever we want. Stay up late. Make plans without consulting anyone.
Some of those freedoms feel good, but at the end of a long day, they’re still the person we want to tell about it. And we wonder how long it will be before our thoughts have somewhere else to go.
I keep coming back to that library book. To the idea that so much of life is borrowed. We can share a home with someone, learn their habits, memorize the sound of their breathing, and still never own the promise of another day with them.
Someone might feel like our soulmate for a few months or a few decades. We can choose them with everything we have, but we cannot make that choice on their behalf. That uncertainty is terrifying. And perhaps it’s also part of what makes being chosen so extraordinary. For a stretch of time, out of all the lives we could have lived, we were part of each other’s.
Why are we so fixated on something needing to last forever for it to have mattered?
One moment can change a life. One conversation can linger in our minds for years. Sometimes the smallest interactions leave the deepest impressions, while the influence of people who have always been there is so familiar that we barely notice it.
Life is a mosaic of these encounters. The people who stay. The people who leave. The ones we barely knew but still remember. Each becoming part of a picture we can only begin to see as we live it.
Perhaps, in time, we stop letting the ending convince us that everything that came before it meant any less.
The rain outside the restaurant window was enchanting. Our feet were intertwined beneath the table. For that evening, we were exactly where we wanted to be.
And somewhere, on a cold November morning, we walked into a café expecting nothing more than our usual order. We couldn’t have known how much that ordinary morning would come to mean or how long we’d carry it with us.
. . .
Photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash
If this resonated, click to subscribe to Old Soul Searching for more reflective essays delivered straight to your inbox.
