The Tragedy of Untimely Recognition

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.

It felt less like collision and more like retrieval — like something ancient inside me waking up and whispering, there you are. Not excitement. Not infatuation. Something quieter and heavier. A knowing that settled into my bones before my mind could argue.

We weren’t logical. We weren’t safe. We weren’t even supposed to happen.

We met on a night that was never meant to exist by routine — no habit, no plan, no pattern. Only fate. A borrowed evening, a wrong turn, a moment neither of us would normally be in. Time and place had no business aligning, and yet they did.

I climbed the stairs toward the balcony. You were unexpectedly there.

And the world stopped.

Not poetically — physically. Sound softened. Motion slowed. Conversation behind us blurred into distance. When your eyes lifted and locked into mine, time froze between the steps you were still finishing and the breath I forgot to take. My flesh became lifeless as my soul leaped from my body and rushed to embrace yours.

People later asked how we knew each other.

They were puzzled by the way we stood there — too still, too familiar, too undone for strangers. Someone laughed and said, So how long have you two known each other?

But we hadn’t.

Not in this lifetime, at least.

Yet our souls had.

What passed between us wasn’t introduction. It wasn’t attraction. It was recognition. A reunification. Something deep and frightening and holy all at once. As if two pieces of the same forgotten story had suddenly found their paragraph again.

I felt it in my chest before I felt it in thought. A pull with memory in it.

Not desire — belonging.

Not curiosity — history.

You didn’t smile first. You didn’t look away. You remembered me back.

We stood there while the moment decided us before we could decide ourselves.

Before names. Before explanations. Before logic rushed in to pretend this was normal.

It wasn’t.

It was ancient. Timeless.

It was the kind of meeting that doesn’t begin — it continues.

From that night on, we didn’t move forward like other people. We folded into each other slowly, cautiously, already aware there was something too large between us to handle carelessly. Yet we did.

We learned each other in fragments — laughter first, then confession, then silence, then longing. Always out of order. Always just close enough to feel, never close enough to stay.

We crossed paths like tides: coming in, pulling back, returning again, pretending distance was a cure when it was only a pause.

Years passed. Lives changed. Names were added to our stories that weren’t each other.

And still, somehow, I can still hear you ... love you… feel you.