Twenty journals on the floor like they staged an intervention. Every one of them thick with handwriting, crossed-out hope, and a younger version of me who thought closure was something you earned instead of survived.

There are more than twenty journals that hold our bodies in ink — years of heat and hesitation, of cities and separations, of promises whispered and abandoned and whispered again. Each page is a version of me asking why we kept choosing the long way around each other instead of staying.

This is the letter she waited for in rooms he never entered. Not his voice exactly — but the one she needed to hear to finally understand why he kept leaving.

If I could step back into the night you met him, I wouldn’t stop you. This is just as much my journey today as it was your chaos then. My hindsight is earned, but this is what I'd tell you.

When souls remember, they don’t ask permission. They don’t check calendars, moral codes, or timing. They don’t care who you’ve become in the years apart. They simply recognize. I didn’t meet you. I remembered you, even if the timing is profoundly wrong.