Love, Memory, and the Spaces Between

For 4 years of my life, I waited for 2024. It was the year I imagined independence would finally solidify into something tangible — the year I would move away, start university, and become the person I had been rehearsing in my head for years. And then it arrived. And then it ended. And I found myself, with eerie predictability, already waiting for 2027. 

This is the quiet loop I have always existed in. As a child, I treated growing up like a destination, not a process. I was in a constant hurry to be older, to be elsewhere, to fast-forward through whatever mundane or painful present I was stuck in. I told myself it was because the best parts of my life were still ahead, but now, as I’m on the edge of turning 20, I wonder: did I ever allow myself to fully live in the moments I kept escaping from?  

I feel it in my relationships too. I’ve always loved with a kind of nostalgia for things that haven’t even happened yet. When I imagine love, I don’t just think about the person; I think about the life we could have. The places we’d travel to, the memories we’d collect, the version of myself I’d become in their presence. But when love exists too much in the realm of potential, do I miss what’s in front of me?

Graham Dean, Enfold (2023).

I’ve been pondering over this a lot lately — how much of my love is tethered to reality, and how much is built on the scaffolding of what could be. The version of love that exists in my head is so intoxicating, so beautifully orchestrated, that sometimes the real thing, in all its small, unspectacular moments, feels…quieter. Less grand. And maybe that’s the problem. I’ve spent so much time living in the future that I’ve forgotten how to exist in the present. 

It’s a strange thing, to live in a love story that hasn’t been written yet. I hold onto the fantasy like a lifeline, believing that if I envision it vividly enough, it might materialize. I fall in love with a future more than a present. I see a person and immediately cast them in a role they don’t even know they’re auditioning for.  

I wonder if this is a form of self-protection. If love remains something that exists just beyond my reach, in the space between now and someday, then it never has the chance to disappoint me. Real love, the kind that exists in the everyday, is messy. It demands patience and compromise and the acceptance of another person as they are, with all their flaws, not as they could be. But when I keep love at a distance, imagining it instead of fully stepping into it, I preserve its perfection. It remains untouched, unsullied by reality. Perhaps it’s my desire for control — this idea that if I can map out a relationship’s trajectory, then nothing can blindside me. Or maybe, at my core, I am just deeply sentimental. I love love, not just for what it is, but for what it has the potential to be. 

Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Rest Energy (1980).

Yet, there is a loneliness in this. A constant yearning, a never-ending chase for something just out of sight. How can I ever feel fulfilled when my heart is always reaching forward, skipping ahead to the next chapter before I’ve even read the current one? 

I think about my childhood, about the way I ached to fast-forward through the years to the parts that seemed exciting. Looking back, I see so many fragments of a youth I never fully embraced. I see now how I have done the same with love. I have treated it as something that will arrive fully formed in the future, rather than something that is meant to be built in the present. I have been chasing a mirage, mistaking the shimmer in the distance for water, only to arrive and find that it was never really there. 

There’s a moment in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that has always stayed with me. Joel looks at Clementine, his voice soft but certain: “I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you.” In that moment, he is stripped of cynicism, of doubt, of the walls we build to protect ourselves from disappointment. I can see myself in Joel. Not just in the way he loves, but in the way he clings. The question that lingers — one that Eternal Sunshine asks with heartbreaking honesty — is: How do you let go of something that only exists in your memory? But more than that, how do you stop mistaking memory for love?  

Film still from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Michel Gondry (2004).

I’m starting to learn that real love is about learning and choosing to stay. To be present in the uncertainty, in the moments that aren’t part of some grand narrative. Maybe it’s about accepting that love is not just the future we dream of, but the quiet, unremarkable moments that build upon each other, one after the next. Maybe love is about letting go of the version of myself I thought I needed to become and simply allowing myself to be. 

The hardest lesson I have had to learn is that love, in its truest form, does not need to be reciprocal to be real. I once thought that love required an endpoint, a confirmation, a form of security that told me it was worth something. That it had to be returned in the exact shape I gave it. I’m beginning to believe love is more about release than possession. It is about the quiet, steady act of caring without expectation. It is about letting it be what it is rather than forcing it to be what I want. There is something terrifying about this kind of surrender. To sit in these moments of irresolution, to love without grasping, to release the desperate need to know where it will go. But isn’t there also something beautiful in that? In allowing love to be present, without worrying if it will last? In finding meaning in the experience of it rather than in its outcome? 

People always say life never works out the way you plan it. I’ve heard it so much that it has become its own form of background noise, a statement I nod along to but refuse to fully internalize. The idea that I won’t get everything I imagined, exactly as I imagined it, is a hard pill I have not yet decided to swallow. But am I holding onto these visions of the future as an act of hope, or as a way of numbing myself to the uncertainty of the present? 

Maybe Joel had it right. When he chose to stay, despite everything seeming to scream “let go”. It’s easy to get lost in a perfect memory or an imagined future, but love requires presence, the willingness to be vulnerable even when the ending isn’t clear. Just like Joel and Clementine, maybe the key isn’t in erasing pain, but in living through it together. To choose love, in all of its messy beauty.  

I still have so many unanswered questions. I understand now though that life isn’t meant to be figured out in advance. And maybe love isn’t something to be molded into perfection, but something to be met where it stands. So I’ll try, for the first time, to stand still.