I Fell in Love with a Memory

I fell in love with a memory.

Not with the person I knew,

but with the version of them that lived

in the quiet corners of my mind.

There was a day —

I can’t remember when it began or ended —

when the air felt like a song,

and your voice,

just your voice,

was enough to make the world hold its breath.

That’s the moment I kept.

That’s the fragment that refused to fade.

It’s strange how love behaves in the dark.

When everything is gone —

the calls, the laughter,

the tender chaos of belonging —

what stays behind isn’t the truth,

but a tender illusion that feels softer than reality.

I loved that illusion until it became real.

I fell in love with a version of you

that time had already erased.

You never stayed long enough to become a habit,

but you stayed long enough to become a ghost.

And now, you live there —

between the heartbeat and the hush,

between remembering and forgetting,

between my now and your once.

Every night I visit that place.

I see us again —

your head tilted,

eyes like questions you never asked,

hands brushing against the edges of what could have been.

And for a few seconds,

I believe the lie the heart keeps whispering:

that what’s gone can still return.

But love, in its cruel wisdom,

teaches you that memories never really come back.

They just play in loops —

familiar, haunting,

like a melody you can hum but never finish.

I listen anyway.

Because some songs

are worth the ache they bring.

There are days when I try to move on.

I fill the silence with noise,

the distance with faces,

the emptiness with half-hearted smiles.

But sometimes,

in the middle of a crowd,

a scent passes by —

a trace of your perfume,

or something close enough —

and suddenly I’m not here anymore.

I’m back there.

In that one perfect second

where I believed forever could fit inside a single heartbeat.

I fell in love with that heartbeat.

With the rhythm of a past

that still insists on living in the present.

I loved the idea of you —

the thought of us —

more than the truth ever allowed me to.

And that’s the cruelest kind of love:

the one that never gets to grow old,

because it died before it had the chance.

Sometimes I wonder if you remember it too.

Not the words,

not the promises,

but the silence between them —

that sacred pause

where we almost told each other everything.

Do you ever wake up with a shadow of me

brushed against your dreams?

Do you ever feel that unexplainable ache

that has no name but still feels familiar?

If you do,

then maybe we’re still connected —

not by time,

not by touch,

but by the persistence of memory.

Because memory is stubborn;

it doesn’t care for closure or distance.

It hides inside the smallest things —

a song on the radio,

a passing face,

the way the evening light falls just so —

and suddenly, there you are again.

I fell in love with a memory,

and it taught me something both beautiful and brutal:

that love doesn’t always need presence to survive.

Sometimes it thrives in absence.

It lingers in unfinished sentences,

in things we meant to say,

in moments that never found a home in reality.

And maybe that’s okay.

Maybe love isn’t about holding on,

but about remembering softly.

About honoring what was real enough to be missed.

Because even if you were just a memory,

you were the most human thing I ever felt.

And if that’s all you’ll ever be —

a flicker of warmth against the cold of forgetting —

then I’ll still be grateful.

Because for a while,

you made my heart believe

that even a ghost could feel like home.