before you turn into someone else

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Tala,

I don't know if you still let people call you that. Maybe it's just "T" now. Or something cooler, cleaner, more you-but-not-me. But you'll always be Tala to me. Star, light, orbit, everything I couldn't reach but tried anyway.

I keep wondering.. how much of you is still the you I knew?

Like, do you still hate soggy fries but eat them anyway because you don't like wasting food? Do you still do that little twitch with your left eyebrow when you're pretending you're okay but you're really not? Do you still fall asleep to sad songs on purpose?

I don't mean to sound creepy. God. This is coming out wrong.

What I mean is.. I'm scared that the version of you I love is already fading. Like a photo left out in the sun too long.

I saw a picture of you. Just one someone else posted. You looked.. older, maybe. Different. Happier?

I didn't know how to feel. Part of me wanted to print it and tape it to my wall. Part of me wanted to cry. Mostly, I just wanted to be the one who took it.

I don't want to trap you in who you were. That wouldn't be fair. You're allowed to grow. You're allowed to change.

But still.. before you turn into someone else entirely, before your laugh loses the part of it I memorized, before your eyes stop recognizing things that remind you of me,

can you just.. remember?

Just once.

Remember the way we slow danced in your kitchen at 1AM, no music playing? Remember when we made up fake names at that cafe and pretended to be strangers on a first date? Remember that dumb inside joke we had about oranges and planets and how we said we were each other's "gravity"?

What am I even saying.

I guess I'm just asking for this:
before you become someone else,
before you become someone else's,
please remember that you were mine once. 

And I was yours.

Even if just for a season. Even if just in that version of you I'm still in love with.


-A.

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