We unknowingly become archives for one another. Somewhere, someone remembers the YOU before life became complicated, the version of you that existed before you knew how much becoming would cost.
By: Astrid Sarmiento a.k.a Lil Poetrid
Lately, I've been reconnecting with people I knew in high school.
There's something strange about speaking to someone who remembers a version of you that no longer exists.
Or perhaps that version of you still does exist. Maybe it is simply buried beneath years of becoming.
Reuniting with people I knew then has been interesting, beautiful, and bittersweet. We remember the hallways we walked through, the classes we shared, and the inside jokes that at one point made us feel so full of life.
And somewhere in their memory, I am still sixteen, untouched by all the things that would eventually change me.
The strange thing is that I've kept versions of them too.
To me, it feels like yesterday, despite the fact that next year will mark twenty years since we graduated high school.
Sometimes I sit in awe of the beauty of life. Throughout the trajectory of our lives, we will meet so many people and lose touch with them because of circumstances, distance, and timing.
It reminds me of that quote: "You haven't yet met all the people who are going to love you."
It might be a small world, but the stories among us are vast and never-ending. Even after someone has parted ways with us, or left this world entirely, the memories and love somehow live on.
One of the most unexpected gifts of reconnecting with people from my teen years has been hearing who I was through their memories. I've been reminded that I was a safe space for people. That I was always happy and laughing. That I carried a warmth with me, a feeling of home.
It's strange hearing someone describe a version of you that you haven't thought about in years.
They remember things you've forgotten, and in return, you remember things about them that somehow faded from their memory too.
Isn't it amazing how deeply we can impact one another without realizing it until years later?
People will remember a joke you made. The way you welcomed them with open arms, perhaps during a time when others were unkind to them. They'll remember conversations that seemed insignificant at the time but somehow stayed with them.
Sometimes they even remember qualities in you that life, heartbreak, grief, and adulthood made you forget you possessed.
And perhaps that is another beautiful purpose people serve in our lives, they become witnesses to versions of us we can no longer access on our own. Through their memories, they grant us a way back to ourselves.
There are pieces of who I was at sixteen that exist now only in the memories of other people.
I find that incredibly moving.
We spend so much of adulthood thinking about who we are becoming that we rarely stop to consider all the versions of ourselves we have already been.
The girl who walked those high school hallways had no idea what was waiting for her out in the world. She didn't know who she would love, who she would lose, what would break her heart, which dreams would change, or which parts of herself she would someday have to rebuild.
Yet when someone from that time looks at me, for a moment, none of that has happened yet.
Somewhere in their memory, I am still sixteen, and somewhere in mine, so are they.
Maybe that is why reconnecting after so many years feels so surreal.
We're sitting across from one another as adults, carrying entire lives that didn't exist the last time we truly knew each other. There are marriages, careers, children, losses, accomplishments, disappointments, and entire stories tucked between then and now.
We are familiar strangers.
We recognize the faces, the laughter, maybe even certain mannerisms, but we have to learn each other again.
And I think there is something beautiful about that too.
Sometimes people aren't meant to remain beside us for every chapter. Sometimes they disappear for ten or twenty years and return carrying a small piece of ourselves that we didn't realize we'd left behind.
Maybe that's why certain reunions feel less like meeting again and more like remembering.
Though so much of our lives eventually fades into darkness, perhaps that is why we find each other again...to discover a forgotten version of ourselves that has been quietly living in the light of someone else's memory.
These individuals who were once a huge part of our lives become living witnesses to a life we can never return to, a time when the people we lost were still alive, our futures were still unwritten, and we had no idea we were living inside a memory we would someday ache to revisit.
Perhaps that is the quiet mercy of remembering...for a moment, memory grants us an impossible gift and time gives back what it took.
By reconnecting, we are young again. The people we lost are alive again, and the future hasn't happened yet.
And for the length of a memory, we get to go back home.
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