The Aftertaste of a Week

You know you have been living in the present when memory itself becomes a stranger. To live fully, fiercely, is to surrender the impulse to archive, to stop clutching at details as if they were treasures in a museum. I used to live that way, cataloguing gestures, saving words, preserving every glance in the fragile jars of recollection. It was exhausting. I was so busy preparing for the future, for the inevitable loneliness of remembering, that I never truly entered the moment I was in.

Until I met you.

You arrived without thunder, without spectacle, and yet you rewrote the air around me. With you, time bent itself, soft and elastic, carrying us not forward or backward but simply here. I forgot to take notes. I forgot to rehearse the act of remembering. I forgot myself, in the best possible way.

You said something one evening that lodged itself in me like a seed: “In life it’s not the people that leave, it’s a part of us they take with them, and it’s a part we can learn to heal.” I don’t know if you remember saying it, but I do. The words were gentle and devastating all at once, as if you had pressed your hand into the hollow of my chest and touched the truth I had been trying to ignore.

That week, we only had a week, felt like a spell cast carelessly by the universe. We did not plan for it, nor did we deserve it any more than others do, but it arrived, shimmering and intact. Each morning opened like a curtain and revealed us, a little dazed, laughing at nothing, talking about everything. Each night closed with the kind of quiet I had always longed for, not silence, but presence. You never once made me feel invisible, or small, or ornamental. There was no effort in your kindness, no calculation in your attention. You simply were, and I simply floated.

It is strange to think that a person can become an atmosphere, but you were exactly that. You were the weather I had been waiting for, unpredictable in your humor, steady in your warmth. The world shrank to the size of that week, and yet in those brief days I lived more expansively than I had in years. The ordinary became strange and glittering; a walk was not a walk, but a journey, a meal was not food, but communion. You turned each moment into something porous, something wide open, something that could carry me past myself.

Now that it has ended, I am left with the aftertaste, sweet, elusive, half-imagined. I try to recall the exact shade of your laughter, the precise rhythm of your words, but memory betrays me. I think this is what it means to have lived in the present: to surrender certainty, to accept that the past cannot be pinned down like a butterfly in glass. What remains is not detail but essence, not narrative but pulse.

I do not know if we will meet again. I hope so, with the kind of hope that feels both foolish and necessary. The world is large, and yet it has ways of arranging its coincidences. If we do meet again, I want it to be like before: unplanned, unhurried, unmeasured. I want us to float once more, untethered, as if the laws of gravity had temporarily given us leave.

Until then, I will carry the part of me that you awakened, the part that knows how to live without hoarding the moment. That is the gift you left me with, not absence, not longing, but a strange and quiet fullness.

And if you happen to be reading this, know this: I learnt more from you in one week than I have in years of trying to gather wisdom elsewhere. You did not teach me with words, but with the way you moved through the world, with the way you held space for me. That is a rare thing. That is a kind of love, even if we never named it so.