Memory is a punishment for those who treats love like a devotion.
“What is human without nostalgia?”
The question lingers, heavy and unmoving, like air before a storm. It sits in my chest, pressing quietly, as if waiting for me to answer something I have been avoiding for too long.
And so I begin to think of the past the way one thinks of an abandoned place — familiar, yet distant. A house you once lived in, where the walls still remember your laughter, but the doors no longer open the same way. You can walk through it in your mind, trace every corner, every detail, but nothing responds to you anymore. The echoes remain, but they do not echo back.
It feels like returning to that house with a candle cupped in your hands. The flame trembles, small but stubborn, casting light on rooms that have long forgotten your name. You move carefully, as if something might still be there — as if someone might turn the corner, smile, and take the light from your hands.
But the silence stretches. No footsteps answer yours. No breath disturbs the air. The candle burns, not because anyone is waiting in the dark, but because you are. And slowly, you begin to realize: you were the only one who ever came back.
After a quiet moment of realization, it became clear to me that I no longer want to return there. Not to that room. Not to that old playground of memory where I am the only one left wandering, drawing circles around things that no longer come toward me. It now feels unwise to keep going back to a place that was never meant to stay.
To those ghosts who visit my mind once in a while, do you ever think of me? Does my name still exist somewhere in the quiet spaces of your mind, in between pauses, in between breaths? Or have I become something softer, something easier to forget — like mist that disappears the moment the sun decides to rise?
Sometimes it feels like I am the last visitor in a place that has already closed. Walking through what we used to be, brushing my fingers against memories that crumble like old paper. I try to carry them whole, but they dissolve anyway — turning into dust, slipping through my hands no matter how tightly I hold on.
What do you mean things are not forever? What do you mean this happiness was only meant to flicker, like a borrowed flame that was never mine to keep? What do you mean I poured pieces of myself into something, only to watch them harden into shapes I can no longer reclaim? What do you mean there is no way to go back, when my heart keeps retracing the same worn-out path?
Time moves like a quiet tide. It lets you build castles out of moments, lets you believe they will stand — and then it pulls away, grain by grain, until all that is left is the memory of something that once felt permanent.
I love time for the way it lets light in — for the warmth, the laughter, the feeling of being held inside something that feels like home. But I hate it for the same reason. Because it never promises to stay. Because everything it gives, it eventually takes back, leaving only outlines where something used to be.
Nostalgia arrives like weather you cannot predict. A song, a photograph, a passing scent — and suddenly you are somewhere else, someone else, standing in a moment that once felt endless. You see yourself there, untouched by what you know now, and for a second, you almost believe you can step inside it again.
But you cannot.
And that is where it aches — not just because it is gone, but because it was once yours in a way that felt permanent.
It feels like living between two shadows. One cast by what has already disappeared, and one by what has not yet taken shape.
Maybe the past is not a place you are meant to return to, but a mirror that shows you how deeply you were able to feel. Maybe the ache is not just loss, but evidence — that you stood in something real, that you gave without holding back, that you were alive in a way that mattered.
You do not have to put the candle out to move forward. You do not have to stop looking back to keep walking ahead.
You just have to learn that not every light is meant to guide you forever — some are only meant to show you that you once had something worth seeing.
So let yourself wander there sometimes, but do not stay too long. Let the memories speak, but do not let them become your only language.
Carry the warmth, not the ashes.
Because one day, this present moment will also become a distant room, a quiet echo, a flicker in your memory. And when you return to it, I hope you find not just absence — but proof that you kept moving, even when it would have been easier to stay still.
We may have gone our separate ways. We may never meet again.
But there is one thing I know for sure.
I loved them sincerely, with everything I had. And that is something no one, not even time, can take away from me.
