To the Soul I Never Stopped Remembering,
I don’t know why, but I still miss you.
I’ve tried to keep myself busy. I have several careers and responsibilities now more than two jobs, actually, five and I often tell myself that if I fill my life with enough things to do, perhaps there will be no room left for thoughts of you.
I thought I would eventually forget you, just as I did when I left this city years ago. I moved away, studied, built a life for myself, and tried to open my heart to new people and new possibilities. I thought distance would be enough to erase whatever this feeling was.
Perhaps, for a while, it did.
I grew older. I became a mother. I built a life I once believed would be enough to make me forget everything that came before it. I devoted myself to my career as a teacher and poured my energy into the life I was creating. I thought I had finally moved on.
And then I came back here.
Somehow, returning to this city brought you back with it not physically, but in my thoughts, in my memories, and in a place in my heart I thought I had long since closed.
Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as soulmates. Not because we have shared some great love story, we haven't even had a real conversation. And perhaps that is what makes this so difficult to explain. How can someone I have barely known occupy such a strange and enduring place in my heart?
When I was far away, I would unexpectedly think of you. I used to believe that leaving would make the feeling disappear. Instead, distance only made me realize that some things cannot be measured by proximity.
I've even had dreams about you. In one of them, you were telling your friends that we were meant for each other. I know how strange that sounds, especially coming from me. Perhaps it is only my subconscious creating a story out of something I have never been able to understand.
But there is something about you that has always felt strangely familiar.
I've never truly loved anyone, not in the way people describe the kind of love that completely takes over your heart. And yet, somehow, after all these years, there is still this quiet feeling whenever I think of you.
Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's simply nostalgia, an unfinished thought, or a story my heart created on its own.
But perhaps that's what makes the idea of a soulmate so beautiful. Sometimes, you don't understand why a particular person stays in your heart. You simply know that they do.
So, stranger, if you somehow find your way into my thoughts again after I finish writing this letter, I suppose I won't question it anymore.
Maybe some people are meant to remain strangers.
And maybe some strangers are meant to remain in our hearts long after we have convinced ourselves that we've forgotten them.
I don't know what you are to me.
But after all these years, I still find myself wondering if, somehow, I was meant to find you or perhaps, in some quiet and inexplicable way, you were always meant to find your way back to me.