Beni Hatırla

There are people we miss quietly, and there are people we want to suffer a little because they miss us too.

Beni Hatırla lives somewhere between these two feelings.

It is not a polite goodbye. There is anger in it, but also weakness. A childish wish hidden inside the anger: when the phone rings, think it may be me. When the evening arrives and everything becomes quieter, remember that somewhere in another city I once existed in your life.

I understand that feeling more than I would like to admit.

After some separations, we try to behave like reasonable adults. We say that life goes on, that people change, that everything has an ending. All of this is true. Yet there is another part of us that is not reasonable at all. That part wants the other person to find an old message by accident. It wants a familiar song to ruin an otherwise normal evening.

Not forever.

Just for a few minutes.

Memory is unfair like that.

I have forgotten entire conversations with people who once mattered to me, but I can still remember the road we were walking on. I have forgotten what an argument was about, but I remember the silence afterwards. Sometimes I cannot remember a person’s exact voice, yet I remember perfectly how hearing that voice made me feel.

It keeps useless details and loses important ones.

Maybe that is why being forgotten frightens us.

It is not only about losing a place in somebody’s mind. It makes us wonder whether the past can disappear if nobody carries it anymore. Two people can once know almost everything about each other and later become complete strangers. Still, evening has a strange power. The day keeps us busy. Then evening comes, the world slows, and memory finds the empty spaces.

That is when certain people return.

Not because we want them back.

There are people I remember with love whom I would never invite back into my life. Some stories were beautiful partly because they ended. But I would still like to know that somewhere, on some ordinary evening, they remember me too.

Maybe they hear a song and stop for a moment.

That is enough.

You do not have to come back.

You do not even have to forgive me.

Just do not make me completely disappear.