How I wish I had met you
before I learned how deeply a human can fracture himself,
before life taught me lessons with rough hands
and left its fingerprints everywhere on my past.
I wish I had arrived to you lighter,
less weathered,
with fewer apologies folded into my silence.
Yet here I am,
carrying you with me anyway.
I cherish your memory not occasionally,
not when the nights grow long,
but daily—
as naturally as breathing.
You return to me in quiet moments,
in pauses between thoughts,
in the spaces where words end
and feeling begins.
I pray for you every day.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just softly—
the way one protects something precious
by placing it in God’s hands.
I loved you daily.
Even when I said nothing.
Even when I pretended strength.
Even when distance tried to teach me restraint.
There is no memory that visits me more faithfully than you.
Others knock.
You enter without asking.
My mornings begin with your presence—
not your voice,
not your image,
but the echo of you,
as if my heart remembers before my mind wakes up.
And my nights close the same way—
with your name settling gently into my thoughts,
like the last light in a room
refusing to turn itself off.
If I had known that losing you
would feel like losing a piece of myself,
I would have stopped.
I would have stood still against time itself.
I would have refused movement,
refused progress,
refused the lie that moving forward
always means leaving something behind.
It hurts.
But I carry the hurt quietly.
I pass my days wearing a smile
that only I know the weight of.
A smile stitched together
by a few photographs,
by fragments of our words,
by a month of conversations
that somehow reshaped an entire lifetime.
Those messages—
they are not just texts.
They are proof.
That once, briefly,
two souls recognized each other
in a world that rarely pauses long enough
for that kind of meeting.
There has not been a single day—
not one—
that you have not crossed my mind
since September 2023.
Not during work.
Not during prayer.
Not during laughter.
Not even in moments meant to distract me.
You are there—
not as pain alone,
but as presence.
Life does not feel the same anymore.
The colors are quieter.
Time moves differently.
Joy still exists,
but it carries your absence in its pocket.
I do not write this to bind you to me.
I do not write this to ask for anything.
I write because love, once felt sincerely,
does not evaporate when circumstances change.
It transforms.
It settles.
It learns to live without demanding to be seen.
And if this is all I am meant to have of you—
memory, prayer, remembrance—
then I will carry it with dignity.
Because loving you
changed me.
And being changed by love
is never something to regret.