And if you don’t recognize yourself, that means you did it right

I scrolled through my old files today.

My idle fingers met her in a heartbeat: pale lips, unruly hair, an innocent face that had never learned to brace against the world. She wagered each day on wishes alone, setting them adrift like paper lanterns in the night sky — beautiful to behold, all the while unaware of where they would ever belong.

“We’ve come so far, haven’t we?” I breathed.

Nostalgia has a peculiar way of dressing itself like a homecoming. It persuades you that if you search long enough, you’ll reclaim the person you once were. So I reached for her again — not through the screen, but through memory. Yet every attempt dissolved like mist between my hands. I could remember her vividly, but I could no longer inhabit her skin.

Some distances are not measured in miles, but in the versions of ourselves we can never return to.

Now I can only pause before the girl who had never been acquainted with the grace of her own reflection. The girl who slipped desperate prayers into the pockets of dusk, hoping to earn a place in an academy that always felt out of our league. The girl who longed for friendships that would outlive changing seasons, for indulgences bought without a second thought, for meals chosen by appetite rather than by what was afforded, for clothes worn without the seams of insecurity.

She cupped those fantasies so delicately in her palms that, years later, I held their fruition in mine. Yet I became so occupied with racing forward that I never noticed we had gone our separate ways on an otherwise ordinary afternoon.

I misplaced the timbre of her laughter. I traded the trepidations that once knew me by name for the boldness she would never have recognized. I outgrew the silhouette of the girl who surrendered every piece of herself to become the person her future was waiting for.

The cruelest thing about the cycle of dreams and dreamers is that we were never meant to bring every part of ourselves to the other side of every bridge we crossed. Growth is, after all, an act of deserting our past lives.

When the years have had their say, I can do no more than honor the first stones she had laid along the roads that culminated in this life — and hope that, somewhere time cannot follow, she has found peace in knowing everything turned out alright for us.