You Were My Favorite What If

ou Were My Favorite What If

I don’t know how to start this letter, or even if I should be writing it at all. But if unsaid words carried weight, I’d be crushed beneath the ones I’ve left between us. So this is me, setting them down, even if they’ll never reach you.

You were my favorite what if. The person I met in a moment not quite right, under circumstances neither of us could control. If timing is everything, then ours was both tragic and poetic. You entered my life like a song I hadn’t realized I’d been waiting to hear. The kind of melody that, from the first few notes, feels like home.

I remember how it started — how easy it was. You weren’t like the others. You saw things differently. The way your eyes softened when you spoke about your dreams, the way you believed in impossible futures as though they were already real. You weren’t cynical. You didn’t shrink yourself to fit the shape of other people’s expectations. And for reasons I never fully understood, you let me see the pieces of you you kept hidden from the rest of the world.

We became friends, the kind of friendship that carries too much electricity in its silences. The kind where every shared glance says more than words ever could. People noticed, of course. Friends asked. Joked. Assumed. But neither of us crossed that invisible line — maybe because we were too afraid of what might happen if we did. Or maybe because we already knew.

There were moments though. God, there were moments.

Like that night in late September when we walked home under a sky swollen with stars. You told me about the first time you fell in love, and I told you about the way I always held people at arm’s length. You laughed, not unkindly, and said, “Yeah, I can tell.”

And then, without thinking, I reached for your hand. Just for a second. And you let me.

I think about that moment more than I probably should.

Or the time you drove to my apartment at midnight with coffee and terrible store-bought cookies because I’d had one of those days where everything felt too heavy. We sat in your car for hours, talking about nothing and everything, and the world outside seemed to blur and fade until it was just us, orbiting around each other in a space neither of us was brave enough to claim.

I never told you I loved you. Not in the way you deserved to hear it. I said it in other ways — in the way I remembered how you took your coffee, in the way I kept every terrible movie ticket stub because you liked having souvenirs from forgettable things. In the way I always knew when you needed to be left alone, and when you didn’t.

You were never mine. And maybe that’s why you became mythic in my memory. A story I tell myself in the quiet hours, the kind of story where the endings can be rewritten and the what ifs aren’t so heavy.

I’ve had other people since you. People who loved me, people I tried to love back. And sometimes, I even managed to convince myself that I’d moved past you. But then a song would come on, or I’d see someone wearing your cologne, and it would hit me — you are the ache I carry, the almost that shaped every after.

If I could rewrite our story, would I? I’m not sure. There’s a kind of beauty in the unfinished, a tenderness in things left unsaid. Maybe if we’d tried, it would’ve fallen apart. Maybe it would’ve been messy and complicated and ordinary. And maybe that’s worse than the quiet ache of never knowing.

But still — you were my favorite what if. The one against which all others are measured. The ghost in the room, the name I don’t say but always think.

I hope you’re well. I hope someone makes you coffee the way you like it. I hope you chase the impossible things you used to talk about at 2 a.m. And I hope, selfishly, that every once in a while, something makes you think of me.

Maybe a song. Maybe a star-swollen sky.

Maybe nothing at all.

But if you do — just know, I never really stopped.