Some days, I just want to call you up and ask -

Do you remember?

You don’t even have to feel nostalgic for those days or miss them or want to relive them. I just want to know if you remember.

If you remember the way it felt to hold my hand, to hold me close, to hold my heart. If you remember how cliche some of our moments were - stolen kisses in the backseat of your car, an argument out in the rain. I loved you exactly the way a first love should be: breathless, reckless, fearless.

It’s been years, but sometimes I just want to ask if you remember. If those memories bring a small smile to your lips because they do to mine.

Perfect

"Tell me about her." He eyed me but didn't comment on the nature of my request. "She was everything I thought I wanted in a girl." "So she was perfect," I teased, bumping into his shoulders. A half-hearted attempt to hide my burning curiosity. His eyes held a wistful gaze, his lips twisted in what I now know is a sad smile. I didn't used to think such a smile existed, so counterintuitive to the predominant meaning of "smile." "I didn't expect her to be perfect," he threw my teasing tone back at me. "But...I thought she was perfect for me." I didn't say anything. It stung. I don't know why I asked. "She wasn't though,” he continued. He wasn’t looking at me, and my eyes traced the contours of his side profile, from his chin to his nose, up to when he turned his head, eyes suddenly meeting mine. "And now I realize...perfect? Perfect is you."

Him

"I saw him yesterday." "Oh really?" I feign disinterest. Please drop it, I plead internally. "Yeah," she continues, left index finger twirling her long golden locks. "He asked about you." I don't know how to respond to that. The last time I saw him, he pulled me in for a tight hug and whispered, "I love you." At the time, I couldn't wait to get away, to hide in the confines of my car and cry. But now, when I can no longer remember how his embraces felt or how he smelled after a morning shower, I wish I had held on just a millisecond longer. I nervously laugh. "I haven't seem him in forever." Six months, I calculate to myself. "How is he?" I don't even listen to her response.

Luis Buñuel

You

In every Top 40 song about broken hearts, I hear our story. Around every corner, I see your patient smile and twinkling eyes. In every love poem, I find your words, words that you scribbled to me on stolen napkins with a drying ink pen. Walking against the wind every day, I shiver at the memory of your breath tickling my cheeks, my ears, my hair. In every darkened movie theater, I feel the ghost of your hand reaching for mine. Amongst every sea of people, I catch myself staring at black hair cut in the same style as your own. In every dream, I see you--muted, faded, blurry, yet undeniably you. But when I look in the mirror, all I see is myself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Names

"What's your boyfriend's name?" I ask my new roommate. Her reply feels like the moment before a fall on slippery ice, when your body turns colder than the outside wind and your heart forgets its function. I want to retract my question, but her answer is already floating in the air, so I stutter: "I once had a really good friend with the same name." I pause. "I like that name," I say softly. And as her breathing tempers into a soft rumble, all I can think about are light kisses, squeezing fingers, and brown eyes that once captured my soul.

Beauty

My roommates each come back after work with a story. I have a story too, I tell them. I talk about the crazy lady who called my office today, the one who lives between two glaciers in Alaska. It's not a great story, but I thought it was worth telling. As the laughter dies down, the roommate on my right starts her story. Only hers is about a cute guy she's meeting for coffee tomorrow. And then my other roommate's story is about a phone number written hastily on a grocery store receipt by a hopeful cashier. I mean, there was a cute guy today at my workplace. He talked to me and smiled at me, and when he smiled, a vertical dimple creased his right cheek. I left with a smile on my heart, but no numbers in my hand. As I stand in front of my bathroom mirror, I wonder if any guy will give me a chance. If any guy will look past this mediocre exterior and see a sliver of potential beauty inside. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, they say. But I have only ever encountered one type of beholder.

Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Outliers”

Make a wish, say a prayer, and let the smoke take your words to another world.

First Loves

"I don’t know if I loved him," she said slowly, "but he was the first person I really, really cared about."

Letters

When you were mine and I was yours, I wrote you letters. Lots and lots of letters. Most were written using my favorite pen: a ballpoint, 0.7mm utensil, whose blue ink glided across the page, the way water skims over a weathered pebble. I wrote some in normal black pen, and, if I remember correctly, I even wrote one in red pen (I didn't have anything else, okay). But it always had to be pen. I liked the permanence of pens, the somewhat everlasting nature of dried ink that couldn't be smeared away. I hoped that permanence could be symbolic of our relationship. But the day I left, that last letter I wrote you? I wrote in pencil. Did you notice? Perhaps the words on that page are already smeared and frayed and grayed, lying amidst banana peels and broken glass in a dumpster somewhere. But couldn't you figure out the significance of pencil? Those words can be erased, smeared, rewritten. Maybe I was the only one so optimistic.

Anonymous

The Unsent Message(s)

"Is he doing alright?" I ask my friend, feigning nonchalance to the only question I really wanted answered.

"He’s happy, I think." She sees right through me. "You know, you can text him."

"Yeah, I might do that." A casual shrug.

But I’ve already written countless messages to him—in my phone, my journal, my head. And I know that, no matter how many times my thumb hovers over the send button, those messages will never be read by the one who matters most.

Charles Baxter’s “Clarity”

Charles Baxter's "Clarity"