And Then We Became Strangers Again

We were strangers once.

Real strangers.

You could have passed me on the street, and I would not have looked twice. I didn’t know your middle name. I didn’t know what made you quiet, what you were insecure about, what your childhood bedroom looked like, or what happened to you when you were sixteen that you still don’t like talking about.

Then somehow, stupidly, beautifully, you became familiar.

Short messages became a conversation. A conversation stretched past midnight. I learned your stories, habits, and eventually, I learned your body.

Before you know it, someone has worked their way into the fabric of your life.

You take drives that are supposed to last twenty minutes and somehow end two hours later. You tell them something you weren’t planning to tell them. They remember it. You start collecting stupid little information about each other. You learn their face from angles nobody photographs. You learn the difference between their silence when they are angry and their silence when they are tired.

You stop saying “I.” You start saying “we.”

And somewhere between all those tiny discoveries, a stranger becomes someone you cannot imagine not knowing.

It is insane when you think about it.

Someone can go from being completely irrelevant to becoming the first person you want to tell when something happens.

This is intimacy, I think.

Having a witness.

Someone who knows what happened at work that day. Someone who knows why that comment from your mother bothered you more than you let on. Someone who saw you sick and unattractive and irritated and half-asleep. Someone who knows the version of you that never makes it into photographs.

And then, it ends.

Suddenly, you are expected to unknow each other.

This is the part I still cannot get used to.

Because you can’t.

You can stop speaking. You can unfollow and delete their number. You can remove the photographs, return the sweater, and stop going to the restaurant you always went to together.

But you cannot unknow someone.

You cannot return their secrets. You cannot forget the exact face they make when they are trying not to laugh. You cannot give back all the ordinary little pieces of them that lodged themselves in your memory.

So you become strangers again, but this time with information.

You know things about me you have no business knowing anymore. I know things about you I have nowhere to store.

That bothers me more than I would like to admit.

Because where does all that knowledge go?

Seriously.

What am I supposed to do with the version of you that still lives in my head?

I know how you used to look at me from the driver’s seat. I know which stories embarrassed you and which ones you disguised as jokes. I know what you were like when nobody else was around. I know the small, unimpressive things that would mean absolutely nothing to anyone else and somehow meant everything to me because they were yours.

And now I don’t know what you did last weekend. I don’t know who you tell things to. I don’t know what keeps you awake anymore.

Do you still insist on that awful coffee and take your showers too long?

I used to know before I had to ask. Now asking would be strange.

What a ridiculous demotion.

And the worst part is that life allows this. The earth does not register it.

Two people can spend months collapsing the distance between them and then never speak again, and apparently it is a perfectly ordinary thing that happens every day.

I hate how ordinary it is.

I hate that someone can know the softest parts of you and eventually become a person you would hesitate to say hello to.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I ran into you.

Would I hug you?

Would we smile?

Would we do that awful polite thing people do when they have too much history to behave casually? Would I look at your face and remember everything at once?

Or would you already look unfamiliar?

I don’t know which possibility hurts more.

I want to say we are strangers again, but it is not true.

Strangers haven’t seen you cry. Strangers don’t know where you like to be touched. Strangers don’t carry private versions of you around in their heads.

We are something worse.

Strangers don’t have memories of each other naked in hotel rooms, kitchen floors, laughing in cars, fighting over stupid things neither can remember now.

And none of that knowledge gives us any right to enter the other person’s life.

You did not die. You are just… inaccessible.

And I think my ego hates that. Not because I think I should have you. I don’t.

But some primitive part of me cannot understand how I went from being allowed so close to being entitled to absolutely nothing.

God, I hate that.

I hate how mature that sounds because there is nothing mature about how it feels.

It feels absurd.

I have no idea who you are now.

And the hardest part is accepting that I am no longer entitled to find out.

I used to be able to ask you anything. Now even how are you? would feel like trespassing.

I don’t get to ask anymore.

I don’t get to know.

That change is so violent when you actually think about it. Intimacy has no reverse gear. Nobody teaches you how to unknow someone.

You can stop speaking. Delete photographs. “Forget” dates. Eventually, even the sound of their voice begins to fade.

But you cannot restore the original ignorance.

I can never meet you for the first time again. You can never become the person you were before I knew you.

The first time we met, I knew nothing about you and it was easy. Now I know too much, and somehow the polite thing is to pretend I don’t.

Intimacy rewrites you.

A little. Sometimes a lot.

I want to leave relationships knowing something about myself I couldn’t have learned alone. I want to be able to look at someone who has become a stranger and still quietly think:

I am glad I knew you.

Even if knowing you hurt. Even if losing you hurt more.

I am glad that, out of billions of people, our lives crossed closely enough to know you beyond your name.

How strange is that?

Becoming strangers again feels so unnatural. Because technically, they are gone. Except… they are not.

They remain in stupid little places.

A song you first heard in their car. A dish you learned to cook because they loved it. A boundary you have because they crossed it. A standard you keep because they once showed you how good something could feel.

A city that will always contain a version of the two of you walking through it.

They leave your life.

They do not completely leave you.

So I don’t think we became strangers. Not really.

We became something language is bad at naming. Someone I once knew everywhere and now know nowhere. Someone whose body was once close enough to touch and whose life is now none of my business.

Someone I could tell everything to. Someone I can no longer ask anything.

Not friendship.

Not hatred.

Not even longing.

Just two people walking around with obsolete knowledge of each other.

You are a stranger now.

But unfortunately,

I remember you.

I PUBLISHED A BOOK.

365 reminders for the days when life makes absolutely no sense, your plans have collapsed, your brain has opened 47 tabs, and you need someone to remind you that you might actually be okay.

It is called WHY NOT… SURRENDER?

I wrote it because I needed it first.

And now it is yours. 🤍