“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges of the good old days.” ~Doug Larson
I don’t miss Zinnia.
I miss the zinnias I made.
The real Xenia – the one who fought with me for hours over things that were so much bigger than them, who said things I told myself I would never forgive, who was wrong to me in ways I pretended didn’t even exist – I got rid of them all somewhere along the way.
I kept laughing. Chemistry. The way he understood my humor without me even telling him. The conversation which continued till dawn and still had no sign of ending. Everything else I left quietly, without even noticing that I was doing it.
Then I spent years remembering that version. Like it was something I had lost.
That wasn’t something I lost. That was something I made up.
Memory does not preserve things. It rewrites them. Every time I went back to think about Zinnia, I couldn’t remember – I was painting again. And every time I repainted it, some of the more ugly things faded away. After many years, what I had left wasn’t even a real memory. This was a picture I made. Attention. Flattery. Mostly not true.
In my mind, Zinnia never fought with me. Never said anything that seemed wrong. Just always remained grounded in her best moments. Of course I missed him. I silently designed her to be remembered for years, without ever noticing what I was doing.
However, it was the real Zinnia itself – which caused me to stop eating properly for months. Why can’t you sleep? Why did I spend so much time crawling around in my own head that I forgot what it felt like to simply exist. He was real. All that actually happened.
I knew it the whole time. And yet still missed him.
Because the zinnia I created was much easier to love than the real one.
Here’s the part that finally opened something up in me. I was not remembering Zinnia at all. I was missing who I was when she was still around.
That version of me. It felt as if everything had changed. Whatever I was feeling, I was feeling all the way through, nothing at half the amount. I called it love, but honestly, it was like slowly sinking and deciding that sinking was the same as real depth.
I laughed with him in a different way. Went differently. As if I had somehow become more active. And when it was over the person left. Carried on with him like he was always a part of his life and never really mine.
No one talks about that sorrow. Losing yourself along with the other person. Losing who you were inside that specific relationship, that specific version of your life.
It took me a long time to realize that I was grieving Zinnia. I’m thinking about him while I’m awake. Going over old conversations. And the whole time I was actually mourning the version of me that wasn’t coming back. It’s a completely different loss and for a long time I didn’t have words for it.
Then I went to him again. Years later. There was no way for me to escape. And maybe within ten minutes of standing there and talking, I noticed that something inside me had become very quiet. Nothing dramatic. The woman in front of me had almost nothing to do with who I had been hanging out with for so long. The sadness did not end. Didn’t even sting. It fell flat, like a feeling that was over before I could even catch it.
On the way home, I kept landing on the same thing – I could never remember Zinnia. I was remembering a character I had written. I spent years loving my story about him.
What we had was real. The love was true. But you can love someone truly and still be really terrible at it. Both things can exist inside the same relationship at the same time. For a long time, I couldn’t stop him. I kept reaching for a neat story. Either it was beautiful and the ending ruined it, or it was broken from the beginning. It’s easier both to sit with what was actually true.
What was really true was that it was real love and it was also impossible, and both of those things were happening the whole time. The good moments were real. The damage was also real. It mattered. This too had to end.
She was a human being. We loved each other. This was not enough. That chapter is closed.
And the truth, even if it’s calmer than the story I was living inside, is too light to carry.
About Selim Haydar
Selim Haydar writes essays on memory, grief, identity, and the unspoken parts of being human – anxiety, silence, time, loss, and what it means to exist in the gap between who we are and what we show the world. No advice. No answer. Just honest writing that reveals what it feels like to be alive. Read more at hydervoice.com.
