The mind has a strange way of loving.
It was trained to preserve what others try to forget.
To study the traces left behind: letters, photographs, recollections. History, after all, is just memory made official.
It is never content with the present. It wanders—not to forget, but to find proof that love was once different, once softer, once not ours.
I have spent most of my life studying the past, collecting fragments and restoring what time has tried to erase. I believed history was about truth. That if I gathered enough evidence, I could piece together what really happened. But love, I have learned, obeys no such discipline.
When I met you, I promised myself I would not become one of my subjects. That I would not let emotion interfere with reason. Yet I still find myself correcting your sentences in my head, hoping you will stop speaking of her in past tense. Every time you say she was, I feel history correcting me—reminding me I arrived too late to be your first.
One slip of her name and I am undone. Heart racing over something that is not happening, body grieving something still alive. I am losing myself to stories my mind keeps inventing, to histories it keeps revising, desperate to belong on a page I was never written into.
I told myself this was research. That I was simply studying the woman who came before. But historians lie to themselves better than anyone. What I called study was mourning. What I called curiosity was grief. I was not looking for facts. I was looking for the place where I began and she ended.
The mind, I realize, records betrayal even when it’s imagined.
A mere memory—a letter, a photograph, a recollection once shared—and suddenly I am the historian turned witness to a war that ended years ago. My body reacts as though I were there, standing in the ruins of a love I never fought in.
I do not hate her, no. On the contrary, I have studied her with the care of an artifact. I examined her gestures, her smile, the ways she might have changed you. I catalog her in annotations, compare her traces against mine, searching for patterns, as though it might reveal why you once chose her and why you chose me next. As if understanding her could preserve me. As if knowing what she meant to you could protect me from being forgotten next.
One thought leads to another, and before I know it, I am drowning in reconstructed memories, a historian rewriting the past to justify her own pain. Some nights, I catch myself rehearsing the story of how we will end. The mind mistakes repetition for protection. The more I imagine losing you, the more it feels inevitable. The more I study your past, the more I forget we still have a present.
There I realized jealousy is not a lack of trust in you. It is a lack of mercy for myself—the historian’s curse; an unwillingness to let the past rest; a refusal to forgive myself for not being there first.
The mind is a jealous historian.
It keeps records no one asked for, frames what should have faded, and preserves pain as evidence of love. I, too, am guilty of this. For all my knowledge, I cannot seem to stop documenting heartbreak, rewriting your history until it reads like mine.
But when love becomes a competition with memory, no one wins.
Perhaps all historians are fools—believing that by studying what was, we can protect what is. But love defies chronology. Your past became my subject the moment I chose you. I chose to be buried in its archives.
So I place my pen down this time. I let the ink dry and close the book. Not because I have learned enough, but because I finally understand: you are not a subject to be studied, but
a present I must learn to live.
