I am Everyone I’ve Met

I’ve never been just one person. I am stitched together by the people I’ve met, the ones I have loved, and the ones that I’ve lost. 

Every time someone walks into my life, I fall a little bit in love with them, but not always in the way you’d expect. Not always romantically, but enough to let a piece of them stick to me like honey. 

I collect their sayings, their music, their way of moving through the world, and I carry it like a lifeline. That’s why I care so much. Because I am not only me—I am everyone I have ever met. 

My first taste of love was fire.

He was the moment I realized love wasn’t just a story on a screen, but something that burned in your chest, something that made the ordinary suddenly glow. With him, the world sharpened. The air was different, sweeter somehow.

Even now, his dialect falls from my mouth without warning. His rhythm is tucked into the way I speak, a reminder that my first definition of love came not from myself but from someone else. He gave me my foundation, even if he could not stay. 

Then, there was the mask. 

The one who reminded me that not everything is as it seems, especially in a place like college where so many are still building their faces. 

His smile was convincing, his words careful, but beneath it all was something hollow. And yet, even in deception, he left me pieces I couldn’t unglue. A book I still read when the night is too long. A way of looking at crowds differently, searching for what’s hidden inside. 

He was my lesson that love can bruise, that trust can be misplaced, and that carrying someone doesn’t mean they were good for you. 

Another came much softer. 

Music infused his hands with the perfect words intertwined around his fingers, and patience in his pauses. He didn’t teach me about fire or betrayal; he taught me about listening. Not the passive kind that cracks you open, but the kind that makes you hear yourself in someone else’s song. 

From him, I learned that connection can be as simple as a chord, that sometimes the loudest kind of love is the quietest. His influence hums through the music I return to now, reminding me that growth is found in stillness as much as in storms. 

But my lovers aren’t the only ones who built me. Home shaped me too. 

I grew up watching imperfect love in its truest form—love that bent but did not break. Love that stumbled through bad days but always returned to the table. 

From there, I learned endurance, the kind of devotion that doesn’t vanish when tested. Their words, their phrases, their tired sighs, all live inside of me. I speak with their voices sometimes without even realizing it. 

And then there is the pure kind of love, the one that asks for nothing and gives everything. 

Someone whose kindness is so steady it reshaped how I see the world. From her, I learned gentleness, the kind that doesn’t announce itself, the kind that slips into you quietly and stays. She reminds me that goodness is still out there, that kindness itself can be a compass. 

When I step back and look at who I am, I see it clearly. I am not just myself, I am a mosaic, a collage, a patchwork quilt of borrowed fragments. A phrase from one. A habit from another. A music taste that isn’t really mine but feels like it is. 

A way of loving that has been stitched together by countless hands. 

And I love that about myself. I love that I fall in love with a little piece of everyone I meet, I love that I carry them like lifelines, stringing them together into the person I have become. 

I love that I am not one single voice but a full choir. 

I am a clump of everyone I have ever loved. And that to me, is the most beautiful thing. 

• #personality
• #self reflection
• college
• love