I take all the necessary steps that everyone suggests.
I focus on myself. I stay busy. I study. I work. I spend time with family and friends. I’m involved in organizations. I go to the gym. I invest in myself. I do the whole spiel.
In theory, by default of the many boxes on the “how to get over it” checklist being marked off, I should be too busy, too mentally preoccupied, and too present to dwell on the past.
Unfortunately, theory does not always align with reality.
I don’t think being busy is the remedy for nostalgia. If anything, I’ve found it can become a placeholder for proper contemplation and feeling, prolonging the healing process under the perpetual facade of being okay—or simply being too busy to care.
Beyond productivity, there is, of course, the self-improvement arc.
I think somewhere in this process, in striving to love myself more and become the best version of myself, I developed an underlying belief: If I make the conscious choice to love myself SO much, I won’t crave or desire the love of another because my own love will be more than enough to sustain me.
In theory, that sounds reasonable.
Self-love, in itself, should be sufficient.
Shouldn’t it?
Except this has become yet another instance in my life where theory does not align with reality.
At the end of the day, I think this idea of complete self-sufficiency is somewhat contradictory to our very human nature. I was reading the nonfiction book Conversations on Love, which explores the definition of love itself, the different ways we receive it, and its importance from both a personal and societal standpoint. One of the ideas that stuck with me is fairly simple: humans are social creatures. We sustain ourselves through connection.
Even Maslow figured that one out. Beyond our physiological needs and safety sits love and belonging.
Of course, that love does not have to be romantic. We receive it through family, friends, and the communities we build around ourselves. But I don’t think acknowledging all of that love magically eliminates the desire to experience another kind.
Maybe that is the part I have been trying to outthink.
Everyone close to me who bears victim to my oversharing has heard my new agenda for this year: put no energy into building a relationship and invest in my friendships instead.
I have said some variation of this exact line several times: Why invest in a temporary relationship when I could invest in lifelong friendships?
And on one end, I still find truth in that statement.
On the other, I’ve started to notice the pessimism hiding inside of it.
Temporary.
I doom the relationship before it has even been considered.
To be fair, close to everything in my life right now feels temporary. College, mainly. Florida. My minimum-wage jobs. My apartment. My involvements. I have this just for now understanding of my life as it exists at the moment.
Everything up until May 2028 feels like a waiting room for whatever comes afterward. Eventually, I’ll move. I’ll work a “real” job. Maybe I’ll go to law school. I’ll take all of the later steps toward what I imagine will be a more permanent version of my life.
So naturally, romantic love gets sorted into the temporary category, too.
A lot of the people I meet here want to stay in Florida or otherwise remain farther south. I want to go back north. In my head, the relationship is doomed before it even starts. Friendships can withstand distance, so I’d rather water those seeds.
That sounds fair.
It sounds logical.
Then why does my heart long for more?
Sometimes, I think the explanation is embarrassingly simple: everyone wants what they don’t have.
For the most part, everything else in my life is going solidly well. It is the romantic part that is conspicuously absent. So, of course, that becomes what I yearn for in the quiet hours when I have nothing left to do but think and feel.
Realistically, I know I could date. People have demonstrated interest in me, and if I genuinely put effort into it, maybe I could experience love.
But I don’t.
I’m not sure whether that is out of fear or realism.
Probably both.
I’m scared to genuinely invest in someone new. I’m scared of my lack of experience. I’m scared that yet again, someone will get to know me and realize they don’t actually like me. I’m scared to give more than I get back. I’m scared of being distracted from my ambitions.
Mostly, I think I am scared of the end before anything has even begun.
And maybe the fear of the new is precisely what keeps me holding onto the old.
The old is familiar. Comfortable, even when it hurts.
Holding on gives me an excuse not to move forward. I can’t get into a relationship until I move on from X.
There. Problem solved.
Now I don’t have to admit that perhaps the real reason I “don’t want a relationship” is because wanting one would require me to risk something again.
Or maybe I’m just nostalgic.
I always have been.
I find it more of a burden than a good trait within myself. I perpetually live in some state of reminiscing. Even while good things are happening, I can almost feel myself preparing to miss them.
After a happy hangout with my friends, I fight the urge to send an appreciation message or scroll through the photos for the next hour. After a concert, my post-concert depression lingers for a week while I rewatch the same videos over and over again.
I miss a lot of things.
I miss a lot of people.
And maybe this constant missing is what makes moving on so difficult.
I replay moments in my head. I listen to songs attached to certain memories. I look through old photos. I follow the entire recipe a person follows when choosing to remember something.
Perhaps that is what draws me to taking photos of everything in the first place. I think that if I capture something through a lens, I can hold onto it for a little longer. Something destined to be temporary becomes, in some small way, eternal.
A moment frozen in time.
So maybe this instinct to hold onto everything I experience naturally transcends into the people I experience, too. The nostalgic part of my brain fights with the realist constantly screaming at me to live in the moment.
Maybe I don’t miss the situation at all. Maybe my brain is simply wired to be nostalgic for it by default.
But what’s the difference?
I wrote something similar in my Letterboxd review of Past Lives, one of my favorite movies: missing someone does not necessarily mean wanting to be with them. Sometimes missing someone is less about the person and more about what they represent.
People from our past knew versions of us that no longer exist.
That is what I love about Nora and Hae Sung. He is her childhood friend, her almost, the person some might call “the one who got away” but whom I have always thought of more as the one who never was.
Nora has built an entirely different life. She leaves Korea, eventually moves to New York City, pursues her writing career, and gets married. Yet Hae Sung remains connected to a version of her that her current life can never completely recreate.
When he visits her in New York, their connection feels larger than the question of whether or not they should be together. He knew her before all of it. Before New York. Before her career. Before the person she had to become to build the life she has now.
He represents Korea, her childhood, her family, her culture and, perhaps most importantly, a version of Nora that only exists in relation to those things.
I think we all have people like that.
The person I miss right now, but don’t necessarily want to be with, is kind of my Hae Sung.
We are incompatible in plenty of ways. A relationship realistically doesn’t make much sense for us. I don’t think he even liked me all that much—or at least, not nearly as much as I liked him.
Yet when I miss him, half of it feels like missing how I felt when I was with him.
And half of that feeling has almost nothing to do with him.
It is being home. Summer. Being tan. Being around my family. Having a break from the constant stress of school. Seeing my best friends. Traveling. Swimming. All the tiny components of my life that make me fall in love with the notion of summer itself.
Maybe when I miss him, I am partially grieving a version of myself that could only have existed with him, in that specific moment in time.
Home does that to me, too.
Like Nora, I moved away in pursuit of something bigger. Jersey to Florida is hardly Seoul to New York, but it was a big change to me. And there is something strange about realizing that everyone I meet from this point forward only knows the version of me that exists today.
They don’t know every person I used to be.
Some people do.
Maybe that is part of what makes them so difficult to let go of.
But nostalgia still doesn’t explain everything.
There is another part of me that desperately wants closure. I like completed stories. When something feels unfinished, my brain scrambles to fill in the gap. I replay conversations. I weigh interpretations. I construct explanations. If I can just figure out what happened, why it happened and what it all meant, then surely I can file it away somewhere and finally be done with it.
Except there was no satisfying ending here.
There was confusion. There was a lack of communication. There were questions that never received clean answers.
Sure, confusion itself can be an ending.
My brain simply refuses to accept it as one.
So I’ve tried to create my own.
Maybe I miss him because I’m scared of someone new.
Maybe I miss him because I’m nostalgic.
Maybe I don’t miss him at all; maybe I miss summer, home, or the version of myself I was when I knew him.
Maybe I just need closure.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
As I sit here trying to decipher which explanation is the correct one, I’ve realized I’m doing the exact thing I always do.
I’m trying to outthink a feeling.
My method of healing has always been intellectualization. I believe that if I can find the correct framing for something, I can control how I feel about it. If I can construct an explanation that protects my ego, makes the ending satisfying and turns the whole thing into some meaningful lesson, then I can finally move on.
But maybe there isn’t a perfect explanation.
Maybe all of these things can be true at once. Maybe I am nostalgic. Maybe I miss who I was that summer. Maybe I am scared to start over with somebody new. Maybe the lack of closure keeps me circling questions that no longer have useful answers.
And maybe, beneath every carefully constructed explanation, there is also the embarrassingly uncomplicated truth I have been trying to intellectualize away:
I liked him.
Not just what he represented. Not just how I felt around him. Not just the summer attached to him.
Him.
I liked him more than he liked me, and that hurt.
Maybe healing isn’t finding a smarter explanation for that.
Maybe, for once, I have to let myself feel it without turning it into a theory.