Can We Become Strangers Again?

—A Love Letter to the People We Unknow

What if I told you the saddest goodbyes don’t end with slammed doors or final messages… but with silence that stretches so far, you can’t even remember when it began?

We all have someone like that—someone we used to text every morning, someone who knew our deepest insecurities, someone who could read our silence better than our words. And now? Now they’re just a ghost with a heartbeat. Alive, somewhere. Just… not here.

So I wonder: Can we ever become strangers again?

Not the poetic kind of strangers who catch eyes across a room, full of mystery and maybes. But the real kind. The awkward kind. The I-don’t-know-you kind.

Can we unlearn the sound of their laugh? Can we forget the way they say our name, like it meant something? Can we really pretend we were never everything to each other?

Most people say time does that—makes strangers of us all. But time doesn’t erase. It archives. And one day, when a familiar scent or song unzips the past, it all comes flooding back.

So maybe that’s the real heartbreak:

You never truly become strangers again.

You just become people who used to be something... pretending like it never mattered.

But then again—

What if we could?

What if we could walk past each other like two parallel lives that never touched?

Would that be a blessing?

Or the cruelest kind of freedom?

The truth is: we don't always get to choose who lingers in our memories. But we do get to decide how we carry them.

And maybe—just maybe—that's enough.