I am a little unsettled. I’ve heard that love changes people & that in every relationship you go through you learn something from & grow & therefore shouldn’t regret. This is all well & true & tried & tested for me, but what I am curious about is how do we change?

While on a deleting spree, I decided to read some old chats before axing them. Past relationships. It’s 3:11am & I am not exactly at my most coherent but I remember reading these chats pretty quickly, then glancing back at the names. I was surprised to find that lines that I lazily assumed I wrote were actually theirs. Mine, eagerly surrounding their sentences, were… cringeworthy. I would have never said them today. These were people whom I have touched laughed & talked with, people who don’t talk with me anymore, who probably don’t think of me from that period in time. Just like how I don’t think of me from that period in time. Then one day I see how they eventually found me icky, because I read what I wrote & cringed the same way.

Is this why more people become similarly jaded or as tough as nails, or why some forms of art have been basically similar for centuries, why cults actually get followings & movie scripts include magnetic reencounters between former lovers, why the city seems so small, and everyone you meet reminds you of someone you once knew, and although you get thrilled to find that you have so much in common with someone it’s upsetting to see too much of yourself in them? How much of them becomes hardwired in me?

Having said that, I still dream of a few of these people, & then wake up perplexed.