There are people you are supposed to stop missing.
At least that is what everyone seems to expect.
Enough time passes. Enough damage is done. Enough things are said that cannot be unsaid. Eventually the story is supposed to become simple.
They hurt you.
You leave.
You heal.
You move on.
But memory has never been that obedient.
Sometimes I can go weeks without thinking about you in any meaningful way. Then I will be walking through an empty city at six in the morning, exhausted but strangely peaceful, and something completely harmless will find the exact place I buried you.
Amsterdam.
That was all it took.
I was talking about Gdansk and trying to explain why I love it so much. I said it feels like San Diego and Amsterdam somehow ended up in the same place.
San Diego was home.
Amsterdam was you.
And suddenly I was crying.
I hate that.
Not the crying. I have made my peace with crying.
I hate that after everything, there is still a version of you inside me that feels like home.
Because I remember what happened. I remember the things that hurt. I remember what was lost and what could never be repaired. Missing you does not erase any of that.
But apparently knowing why something ended does not stop you from grieving what existed before it ended.
That is the part nobody tells you.
You can be angry with someone and miss them.
You can know that someone was wrong for you and still remember exactly how safe their hand once felt in yours.
You can understand that the relationship became something painful while still mourning the years when it wasn't.
You can lose faith in the person and still miss the life.
I think that is what Amsterdam is for me now.
Not simply a city.
A container.
A whole version of my life preserved somewhere in canals and bicycles and wet pavement.
There was a version of me there who still believed certain things were permanent.
There was a family.
There were plans.
There were ordinary mornings that did not know they would eventually become memories.
That is what hurts.
The ordinary things.
Nobody mourns the arguments when they miss somebody.
You mourn the stupid grocery store.
The train ride.
The coffee.
The way somebody stood in a doorway.
The language you invented together without realizing you were inventing it.
The version of yourself that existed only because they were standing beside you.
And then one day you are thousands of kilometers away, walking through Warsaw before the city wakes up, and that entire world comes back because you said the word Amsterdam.
I used to think healing meant eventually feeling nothing.
Now I think that might be wrong.
Maybe healing is being able to miss someone without rewriting what happened.
Maybe it is allowing both truths to survive.
You hurt me.
I loved you.
I still miss you sometimes.
All three can be true.
I do not need to turn you into a monster so that leaving makes sense.
I do not need to turn our past into a lie so that I can survive the present.
And I do not have to be ashamed when some part of me still reaches backward.
Love does not disappear neatly when a relationship ends.
It changes shape.
Sometimes it becomes anger.
Sometimes grief.
Sometimes a photograph you cannot look at.
Sometimes a city.
Sometimes it is six in the morning and you are standing somewhere far from everything that happened, crying because for half a second you remembered what it felt like before everything fell apart.
I still miss you.
I wish I didn't sometimes.
But I do.
And maybe the strangest part of moving forward is realizing that I do not actually have to kill that part of myself to keep going.
I can carry the memory without returning to the life.
I can miss Amsterdam without moving back there.
I can miss you without forgetting why you are gone.
And then I can keep walking.