the you i can never meet again.

There is a version of you that still sits with me on a Tuesday afternoon. Your back is against the wall, the silence is pleasant and the sunlight whispers through crooked blinds. You’re smiling, but not at me, at some thought you’re too shy to share. That smile has not aged, not even in my mind. It’s suspended in a kind of light that cannot be recreated, only remembered, only adored.

Time has carried you forward, I’m sure of it. You’re probably somewhere else now, folding your socks in a way that you didn't back then. I bet you drink your coffee differently; three sugars instead of two because life made you sour. You have said things since, to other people, with a voice that no longer sounds like it did when it was meant for me. You hair might be shorter. You might laugh less often. But none of that belongs to the you that I keep.

The person I hold is still twenty-something, still soft with the kind of naïveté you didn't yet know could be tainted. You still believe in things you’ve probably lost faith in by now. You still touch my arm when you laugh, not because you’re trying to be gentle but because you haven’t yet learned to keep your childlike joy contained. You still close your eyes when you’re thinking, like the thought is a song you must hear without distraction.

I’ve replayed that version of you more times than I’ve replayed our actual days together; the loops are cleaner in memory. The silences seem shorter. You never say the wrong thing, never look away too quickly, never step back when I need you to step forward. You stay just before the moment it all went wrong. And in this way, I wonder if I have been loving a ghost longer than I ever loved you in the flesh.

I can remember the exact sound your keys made when you dropped them on the kitchen bench, the scent that wrapped its arms around me moments before you did. I recall the texture of your hair on my bare chest; its silkiness between my fingers, and the burn of your hipbones pressing into the inside of my thighs.

The truth is, I’ve kept you like a photograph I am too scared to frame. Afraid that once I put you behind glass you’ll belong to the past for real. So I keep you loose, folded into the pages of my mind, where I can take you out when the world feels too much. Where I can touch the edges and believe, for just a moment, that they haven’t frayed.

Sometimes I think about finding you, the you now, and seeing what became of us. But I remember that no living being can compete with the perfection of memory, nor the airbrush of passed time. No present moment can stand in a frozen one. The you in my mind has no baggage, no distance, no anger. You are all the best parts, distilled. And maybe that’s unfair to you, but maybe it’s the kindest thing I’ve done for us both: keeping you intact.

Because I know that if I saw you now, I would lose you twice. Once to the day that we let go, and once to the realisation that there’s a you who is a stranger to me.

There are many versions of you in the world now, the one your new friends laugh with, the one your family loves, the one you are in the quiet hours of life. But this is the one I choose to keep. Not because it is truest, but because it is a version of you that lives in my memory, and no one else’s.

A you I can miss; a you I can love.

—yours in memory, amber.