Today, I saw you again. Your hair was tossed neatly behind you, your shoulders framing your stature in lines I recognized from six years ago.
But then you turned around. and it wasn’t you— almost you. Life has a funny way of resurfacing your past when you least expect it.
I wish I didn’t remember people so deeply. I wish I could live in the moment rather than behind it, trailing behind like a shadow that cannot forget the imprint of the sun. But no— my mind has never offered me a simple relationship with memory.
It began with Taylor in first grade: how she wore her hair in two ponytails every day, how she traded her favorite blue bead for my pink one at recess, how she needed stitches after face-planting into the wood chips after I begged to play tag.
And Susie, in second grade, who helped me draw “missing” posters of my lost plush duck to plaster around the school. When I moved back to the US from China, I gave her my email and promised to write back. A couple of months later, Outlook discovered that a child under the age of thirteen was operating my account and shut it down without warning. The guilt of never responding swallowed me whole. I haven’t forgotten her; I couldn’t, even if I tried.
I will never forget ‘C’, who peeled all of my bananas in middle school because I was an incompetent twig of a child, and ‘I’, who defended my lack of hand-eye coordination in P.E., and ‘J’, who wished me well right before a track meet I felt wildly underprepared for. ‘R,’ I will always remember you for the pastry and sweet note you left for me after a favor anyone would have done, and ‘N,’ for the turtle you crocheted for me with such care.
Everyone I have ever met has quietly entered the soft walls of my life and, at one point or another, has left with an elegance I’ve grown to understand. Every person has given me a little piece of themselves to hold and to keep. And to be. I aspire to always be as compassionate as ‘M’, as authentic as ‘E’, and as patient as ‘S’.
What lingers from each encounter isn’t uniform. Some people lend me strength, others shift how I see the world, and some teach me how to love, if only for a moment. After all, we are but a woven tapestry of the people we meet and the stories we experience in this lifetime.
All rivers flow toward the same stream. Everyone pours a drop of themselves into the current, and over time, my cup overflows. And what is most beautiful about it all? Not clinging, not forgetting, but letting the current shape me as it passes through. That is how I stay full, that is how I feel free.
Memory, I’ve learned, does not record people whole. It keeps them the way a stamp keeps a place— an impression pressed once, then softened by time. The outline remains, even as the finer details lift and fade. Faces and voices blur at the edges, but what they leave behind endures: the shape of who they were to me, and who I became in their wake.
So no, it might not have been you that I saw today. But I did visit you again, in my mind. I hope you’re doing well.