Why you keep thinking about someone you haven’t seen in years
She kept thinking about someone she hadn’t seen in years. Not a lover. Not a friend. A version of herself she left behind when she was seven.
The girl kept showing up in quiet moments. In the shower. Driving home. Standing in line at the supermarket. Always the same face. Always asking the same wordless question.
So she started writing letters. Not to anyone living. To the child. Then, without planning it, to someone else. A woman she had never met but could almost see. Her future self.
She didn’t write to some fixed version who had it all figured out. She wrote to someone who would simply understand. Someone who would look back at the woman still trying and not wince.
The letters kept coming. On bad days. On days when she learned something small. Whenever she managed one act of gentleness toward herself, she wrote it down like evidence.
Then one morning she reread something she had written and realized she was no longer waiting for that future woman to arrive.
She had become her.
We carry people we haven’t seen in years because we left part of ourselves with them. A younger version. A harder season. The person we were before we knew what we know now.
Most of us think the way forward is to stop looking back. But sometimes the only way out is to turn around. To sit with the version we left behind and ask what they needed. Not to fix it. Just to say: I see us. We’re still here.
The voice that criticizes us has been speaking for years. It knows every mistake by heart. But there is another voice. Quieter. Easier to miss. The one that says: we did our best. Keep going.
That voice doesn’t show up by accident. It grows one letter at a time. One moment of patience we didn’t think we had. One day when we speak to ourselves the way we would speak to someone we love.
The past keeps calling because it wants to know whether we’re listening. Whether the person we are now would sit with the person we were then without turning away.
Maybe that’s what forgiveness actually is. Not letting someone off the hook. Not saying it didn’t matter. But finally becoming someone the younger version of us could come home to.
What if the girl she kept thinking about wasn’t asking to be forgotten? What if she was asking whether it was finally safe to come along?
Sitting with it:
Is there a version of yourself you left behind that you think about more than you admit?
What would you say to them if you sat down and wrote one letter with no plan to send it?
What does the voice that criticizes you sound like, and what would the other voice need to say to finally answer it?