installment 10: I did it for the memoir

read you talk

The texts on my phone automatically delete after 30 days because I feel like I live in melancholic space already—I don’t need to spend my time scrolling & engulfed in realities that aren’t real anymore. I don’t need to sit on my phone, read old words that bring me back to old spaces & remind me of old times. Scrolling just feels like dreaming about people who only exist in memories, nostalgia lying to you, & your broken heart romanticizing moments you won’t get back. I used to scroll, but I don’t anymore. If I believed in wasting time, reading old texts would be exactly that.

It just seems impossible to look back without rose-colored glasses even though I know it wasn’t all good all the time with anyone. Sometimes I forget how quickly the year has gone by & if I don’t feel like I am who I was in January, I can’t assume anyone feels like the same person, either.

But today, while I was trying to find a specific date by looking through old messages on my laptop, I got distracted & started scrolling through months of messages I sent back & forth with a particular boy.

I always try to think back on memories with my head on straight. I don’t want to romanticize any piece of it—from nights of “is this a date?” to usually responding to him as soon as I woke up, the world was different then. But the truth is, I had forgotten words he had said & feelings I had felt. His texts used to make me smile at my phone like an idiot then & I still found myself doing that now.

My head was on so straight I forgot about all the sweet moments we shared. From texting unfiltered thoughts randomly, double-texting, triple-texting, secretly texting in group settings, all the times I told him he gives me heart-eyes, all the songs sent back & forth, every joke, every favor, to every “I’m coming over”. I forgot about the paragraphs, the existential crises, the random updates, every picture, every video, & every “:)”. I was avoiding looking back with rose-colored glasses so much that I barely let myself look back at all. I didn’t want to remember it for what it wasn’t, so I refused to remember anything. & as much as I hate to get in my feelings about old times, so much of it was really sweet. Even with my head on straight, it felt good to give myself space to sit in what life used to be & a part of me missed it.

But the reality is that I’m the type of girl to protect her feelings by acting like she doesn’t have any & I couldn’t tell where he was at anymore. Two weeks into knowing him, I texted one of my good friends about the newfound crush I had on him I didn’t want & truthfully, even in our best & most fun moments, I never stopped wanting my feelings to fade. & while parts of me still believed in us momths later, I decided I was going to focus my energy on moving on. However, after experiencing the wide range of emotions that come after you decide to get over someone over the weeks that followed (from wanting to kick his door down & scream at him to forgetting he even existed), I realized there are not many things that could keep a heart like mine from loving a heart like his. Some days I felt nothing & other days I felt more stuck than ever (that’s his fault though).

Ultimately, I caught myself wondering if things would have turned out if I had done just one thing differently or said those few words I was thinking that one time or had been a little less like this or a little more like that. & then I started wondering if he ever finds himself thinking about me similarly to how I sometimes find myself thinking about him. I stared at grey & blue bubbles & wondered if we ever overthink each other in the same ways or even at the same time. Which led me to wonder if he ever scrolls, too.

At one point he had told me he had been reading some things I had written & texted me “it’s cool to read you talk about what you believe”.

& I don’t know why, but “read you talk” struck me then & still strikes me now.

I think I got so drawn in by his old messages because I can read them in his voice & parts of him still feel like home.

THE SAME STARS

I took astronomy while I was in college because the boy I liked told me to & I regretted it every single moment because I spent every lecture thinking about how I wished he loved me instead of paying attention like I should have. I was learning about the galaxies God created but instead I was thinking about how grateful I was God created him. I horrify myself.

But even though I would sit in astronomy lost in unrealistic romantic daydreams, I had associated him with stars for a long time before those classes. A few months before the start of the semester, he & I had shared moments looking up at the stars together while in a place far away & agreed they were the most incredible stars we had ever seen. We sat with our eyes to the sky for a long time while he pointed out different constellations to me & talked about how mundane our normal lives felt compared to the place far away. I remember thinking how big the world was & how incredibly small we were, how I could’ve stayed there forever with him, & how no matter how big the feelings I had for him in those moments felt, I was still small. I looked up at the stars, thought of him, & hoped he was thinking of me, too.

I never stopped feeling big feelings for him, but we started looking at the same stars & seeing completely different things. He would stand in front of me, but I stopped seeing the guy I knew at all. I spent a long time wishing we would start seeing the same things in the stars again, but ultimately, I stopped looking up. I didn’t want to think about him anymore & I didn’t want the reminder of what felt like it was going to be forever.

I eventually put all the big feelings I had for him in different spaces, saving my energy for something better or even just something else. But truthfully, my big feelings for him never stopped being big. Instead of love & affection, I carried heartbreak & a strange, somber acceptance & patiently waited for the closure I figured I would never get. They say time heals all & I ended up needing a lot of it. It felt like a long time but I started to feel okay eventually. I figured he’d be better off without me & I tried to be better off without him, too.

I was somewhere else recently, a different place far away. My friends wanted to drive to the Salt Flats outside of Salt Lake City, get high, & look at the stars, but being sober, I usually somewhat remove myself from those situations because I don’t fully participate. After taking moments to explore my surroundings & catch up on all the texts I always find myself ignoring, one of my friends invited me to his blanket to enjoy the specks in the sky with him. I got so used to looking straight out ahead I never even thought about what it would feel like to look up again.

I laid down next to him on his blanket, crossed my hands over my heart, & gazed upwards.

& immediately regretted every moment I had spent avoiding looking at what I was seeing again.

Completely uninterrupted by city lights, trees, or mountains, the sky was bigger than my eyes could see. We could see the shadowy clusters that make up the Milky Way, all the constellations I had learned about plus more, & a beauty I had never seen before. More stars than I had ever considered even existing. I was laying on this blanket, damp from the salty ground beneath us, entirely unbothered by old feelings or my old heart. I was so overwhelmed by the vastness of it all, everything I was feeling was new. It feels cliche to say,but it was unlike anything I had ever felt before. All of those “the world is so big” feelings were flooding back, but they weren’t met with “I am so small”. God created the world, but God also created me. I wasn’t put here to be someone else’s, I wasn’t put here for anyone else at all. I didn’t look up at the stars & think about how I wished I could see the same thing as a boy or anyone else, I looked up at the stars & only considered what they meant to me & me alone. I found myself thinking about him, but not wanting anything from him or desiring to be next to him at all. I had been carrying the association of him & stars for a long time, but I was putting it down.

And when I eventually saw a shooting star, all my passive thoughts about him quickly showed me there wasn’t a piece of me that wanted to wish for him at all. I had everything I needed already, I didn’t need him, or anything else, in that space. I just wanted to think about God & look at His galaxies.

I never thought I’d see stars like the ones we had seen together or the ones I could see in his eyes.

But I did

& they were better than I remembered.