Some People Only Exist in Certain Versions of You

There are people I don’t speak to anymore who I still think about all the time.

Not because I want them back. Not because something dramatic happened between us. Sometimes there wasn’t a betrayal, an argument, or even a final goodbye. Sometimes the distance arrived so quietly that neither of us could say exactly when it began. We simply became people who knew each other once.

I think there is a particular kind of grief reserved for those relationships. It is difficult to explain because nothing necessarily went wrong. There may be no villain to blame, no door that was slammed, no last conversation you can replay and point to as the moment everything changed. There was only time, and the strange way it rearranges us.

I have friendships I can trace to certain versions of myself. There was the person I was in one city, the person I became somewhere else, the person who stayed out too late and believed every night might become a story, the person who thought love was supposed to feel like losing your balance, the person who was still learning what kind of life he wanted.

And there were people who belonged perfectly beside each of those versions.

That doesn’t mean they were temporary in the way we usually mean temporary. When we are living inside a friendship, we don’t think of it as having an expiration date. We think we will always know how to call each other. We think there will always be another birthday, another coffee, another late-night conversation, another reason to find our way back.

But sometimes we change faster than a relationship can follow.

I remember a friendship that once felt like a small country of its own. We had our own language, our own references, our own understanding of the world. There were things I could say to that person without explaining them because they had been there for the beginning of the story.

Then, slowly, our lives began moving in different directions.

Nothing happened.

That was almost the hardest part.

There was no great ending to mourn, so I kept expecting the friendship to return to what it had been. I thought maybe we’d both get less busy. Maybe we’d find our way back. Maybe enough time passing would make us familiar again.

But sometimes enough time doesn’t make you familiar.

Sometimes it introduces you to two strangers who happen to remember the same things.

I think we underestimate how much of a relationship is built from shared circumstances. You meet someone when you’re both lonely, or ambitious, or reckless, or heartbroken. You live in the same neighborhood. You work together. You are both trying to figure out who you are. You are both twenty-three, or thirty, or newly single, or newly in love. You become important to one another partly because you’re standing in the same chapter.

Then the chapter ends.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

There are people who knew me when I was becoming someone I no longer am. I am grateful they knew that person. I don’t wish I could go back and become him again simply so I could keep them.

That might be one of the hardest truths about growing older: sometimes keeping a person would require keeping a version of yourself you’ve already outgrown.

And I don’t think we should have to do that.

There is a strange temptation to measure the value of a relationship by its permanence. We talk about forever as though it is the highest form of love, and perhaps sometimes it is. But I don’t know if something has to last forever to have lasted long enough.

Some people arrive and teach you how to laugh again.

Some teach you how to leave.

Some show you what you want.

Some show you what you never want again.

Some simply sit beside you while you become someone else.

And then, one day, they are gone.

Not necessarily from the world. Just from your world.

I used to think this meant I had failed somehow. That if a friendship ended, or a relationship became a memory, then I should have done something differently. Held on tighter. Called more often. Explained more. Tried harder.

Now I wonder if sometimes the opposite is true.

Maybe the relationship did exactly what it came to do.

Maybe we met each other at the precise moment when our lives could change one another. Maybe we were supposed to share those years, those apartments, those long drives, those mornings when neither of us knew what we were doing. Maybe we were supposed to become witnesses to one another’s becoming.

And maybe that was enough.

There are people I would still hug if I saw them tomorrow. People whose names can make an entire room inside me light up for a second. I can remember exactly how they laughed. I can remember the places we went and the songs that belonged to those years. I can remember who I was when they knew me.

I don’t need to have them back to be grateful that they were there.

Perhaps that is another form of love: allowing someone to remain important without insisting that they remain present.

There is tenderness in letting the past stay in the past without making it smaller.

Sometimes I think about all the versions of myself that exist only in other people’s memories. There is a me that only one old friend remembers. A me that existed in a certain apartment, in a certain city, during a particular winter. There are people walking around carrying tiny pieces of me that I haven’t seen in years.

And somewhere, perhaps, I am carrying pieces of them too.

Maybe that’s what we mean when we say someone changed us.

They didn’t necessarily stay.

They left something behind.

A way of seeing the world. A phrase you still use. A song you can’t hear without remembering them. A courage you didn’t have before. A scar. A softness. A version of yourself you didn’t know existed until they called it out of you.

We are all made, in part, from people who aren’t here anymore.

Some are still alive.

Some live across oceans.

Some are only a name in our phone that we will never press.

Some are strangers now.

And some are simply people we loved in a life that no longer exists.

I think I’ve stopped being angry at that.

There are people who only make sense in certain versions of us. Not because the love wasn’t real, but because we were real too—and we kept changing.

I don’t want to go back to every person I’ve lost.

I just want to remember them kindly.

To look back at those old versions of myself and say: you didn’t know how long it would last. You didn’t need to. You were there. You loved them. They loved you. You were both becoming.

And for a while, your lives fit together.

Sometimes, that is the whole beautiful story.

A little something to write

Who only existed for a season of your life?

Think of the person who belongs unmistakably to a certain chapter—the friend, lover, stranger, roommate, colleague, or almost-something who knew a version of you that no longer exists.

Write about who you were when you knew them.

What did they give you that you still carry?

And if you can, let yourself consider this: what if they didn’t leave too soon? What if they stayed exactly as long as they were meant to?

Skinny Dipping in December — now available for pre-order

There are people who appear in the pages of Skinny Dipping in December who feel a little like this—the people we love, lose, remember, and carry with us long after the chapter has changed. The collection is about the many forms love takes along the way: the people who stay, the people who leave, and the versions of ourselves we become because they were once there.

And with your pre-order, we’re sending along a little something to carry with you: a free temporary tattoo gift with every Skinny Dipping in December pre-order. A small piece of the book to keep close, long before the pages arrive.

Claim Your Free Gift

Love from the shadows,

xx Atticus