There is a moment I can see and replay from college from outside my own eyes. I see it as from a movie; the view is as surely of the two of us walking towards each other through the space, as it is her walking towards me from my own eye. This is how I know it’s not a true memory, but a composite fold into my neurons from “reliving” it over and over again. 

We’d broken up after Thanksgiving, Junior year, and steered clear of each other afterwards. We’d had very little in common, except our passion, so it was rare for our paths to cross. Either during finals, when the campus was thinning out, or early the next semester, when new class schedules bred new routes and new collisions I saw her again for the first time. 

The plaza between the Engineering Building and the side of the library was off the beaten path, and bounded a triangle, which pinched people inward despite being a decent size. The building walls made an empty brick canyon, and I saw her about the same time she saw me. My legs got weak and heart pounded as we stopped a few feet away and chatted like being four feet apart wasn’t a distance measurable in pain or confusion. It was polite. We caught up about nothing. It was fine, which was a step up from the choking throat the last time I’d seen her. I can watch us walking away after a minute, going on with whatever else happened that day. I have no idea. The memory of that day is that instant overexposed; burning out any image of the rest.

The camera of my mind is obviously a lie, but it was probably also a mental tool. I wonder if I didn’t dissociate in that moment to distance myself from the emotion of reckoning with, and reconciliation with, the tumult of a breakup that had left me raw and confused. After weeks of not confronting my failure, here it came walking towards me across the quad, so I experienced it partially as a spectator to myself. 

One painfully cheesy but absolutely truthful and accurate recollection is that as I walked away, the song “Separate Lives” by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin began playing in my head. 

I will close by quoting my favorite author, again reminding myself that I am only one part of any story. 

“She did not live her life to be a memory for me, or anyone, but she is. Some people mark you as they go by.”

Guy Gavriel Kay in A Brightness Long Ago