I saw her today.
Maybe it was an accident.
Or maybe my eyes had been looking for her long before I even realized it.
She looked good. Great, actually.
And strangely enough, I felt nothing.
No sudden heartbeat.
No nervousness.
No thousand thoughts crashing into each other.
Just… nothing.
For a moment, my mind went quiet.
And somehow, that silence was more confusing than all the noise I had carried for months.
Because how could I remember someone almost every day, miss her in places she wasn’t, replay conversations that happened months ago, and still feel like she was a stranger when she stood right in front of me?
“Maybe I didn’t stop missing her. Maybe I just stopped recognizing her.”
I looked at her and remembered the talks.
The stupid laughs.
The little things.
The version of her that once felt so familiar that I could almost predict what she would say next.
The girl who could make an ordinary conversation feel like something worth remembering.
But she wasn’t that girl anymore.
Or maybe she was.
Maybe I wasn’t.
I don’t know.
I really don’t.
Perhaps somewhere along the way, she lost the child in her—the softness, the innocence, the little things that made me feel something I couldn’t explain.
Or perhaps I lost the version of myself who saw those things in her.
Maybe people change.
Maybe that’s what growing up is.
You become wiser, stronger, more mature. You become a different version of yourself, and sometimes the people who once understood you no longer recognize you.
And that’s the strange part.
She may be happier now.
She may be better now.
She may be more mature than the person I once knew.
And I genuinely hope she is.
But that doesn’t mean this version of her has to be mine.
People often say, “If you truly love someone, you should love every version of them.”
Maybe that’s true for some people.
But perhaps not for me.
Because I don’t think I fell for every possible version of her.
I fell for that version.
The one who laughed at those things.
The one who talked to me like that.
The one who existed in that particular chapter of our lives.
And maybe that version is gone.
Not dead.
Not erased.
Just… somewhere in the past.
And perhaps that’s why seeing her today felt so strange.
I thought I would finally get the closure I had been waiting for.
Instead, I got something quieter.
I saw the person I had spent so long missing—
and realized the person I missed wasn’t standing there anymore.
She looked familiar.
But she felt like a stranger.
And for the first time, I think I understood something:
“Sometimes you don’t move on from a person. You move on from the version of them that you loved.”
Maybe I still miss her.
Maybe some part of me always will.
But perhaps I don’t miss her anymore.
Perhaps I miss who we were.
Who she was.
Who I was around her.
And maybe that’s okay.
Because some people aren’t meant to remain in our lives.
Some versions of people aren’t meant to last forever.
They simply exist long enough to become a memory.
And maybe today, for the first time, I didn’t lose her.
I simply realized that I had already lost the girl I was looking for a long time ago.
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