You Are Everywhere, Yet You Have Never Been Mine

You Are Everywhere, Yet You Have Never Been Mine

There is something strangely beautiful, and equally cruel, about the way love begins to reshape the world around you.

Before you, songs were just songs. They were melodies I enjoyed on quiet evenings or lyrics I absentmindedly hummed on my way home. Now, every love song sounds like it has borrowed a page from my life, and every lyric somehow finds its way back to you. It no longer matters who wrote it or what story it was meant to tell because somewhere between the chorus and the bridge, I always end up hearing your name.

It is almost embarrassing how easily the world reminds me of you. I see two people walking side by side, and for a brief moment I imagine what it would feel like if one of them were us. I watch someone laugh at another person’s joke, and I wonder whether you laugh like that when you are truly happy. I pass by places we’ve both been, conversations we’ve once shared, and suddenly the ordinary becomes sentimental for reasons nobody else could possibly understand.

You have become a quiet presence in places you have never even been. You have become the standard against which I unknowingly compare every beautiful thing. Every kind gesture makes me think of your kindness. Every genuine smile reminds me of yours. Every person I meet is measured against a version of you they could never possibly become, not because they are lacking, but because my heart learned your language before it learned how to let go.

Perhaps that is what love does.

It quietly rewrites the way you experience the world until the person you love begins existing in places they have never stepped foot in.

You have no idea how often I search for you without meaning to. My eyes instinctively look for you in crowded rooms before I even realize what they are doing. My day feels inexplicably lighter on the rare occasions I get to see you, even if we exchange nothing more than a passing smile or a conversation that lasts only a few minutes. Those moments are so ordinary that anyone watching from the outside would think nothing of them.

Yet somehow, they become the moments I replay the most.

You have a way of bringing out parts of me that I didn’t know existed. Around you, I laugh a little easier, notice the little things a little more, and become a version of myself that feels lighter than the one I carry through the rest of the world. I don’t know if you’ve ever realized that, and perhaps it’s better if you never do.

You remind me of no one.

Instead, everyone reminds me of you.

You are like that one song I heard by accident and somehow knew, from the very first note, that it would become the soundtrack of my life. The kind of song that never grows old no matter how many times I return to it, because each listen uncovers something I hadn’t noticed before.

Loving you has felt very much the same.

Quiet.

Familiar.

Endless.

And perhaps that is why the hardest part has never been loving you. The hardest part is accepting that after every song, every passing thought, every hopeful glance across a crowded room, every version of the future my heart quietly imagined…

. . . you were never mine to begin with.