“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges of the good old days.” ~ Doug Larson
I don’t miss Zinia.
I miss the Zinia I made up.
The real Zinia – the one who argued with me for hours about things that were bigger than they should have been, the one who said things I will never forgive myself, the one who did me wrong and I pretended they didn’t exist – I got rid of that somewhere along the way.
I held back my laughter. The chemistry. The way he understood my humor without me having to explain it. Conversations that lasted until Fajr and still didn’t seem finished. I dropped everything else quietly without realizing I was doing it.
Then I missed this version for years. As if something was lost.
He wasn’t something I lost. He is something I built.
Memory does not preserve things. Rewrites them. Every time I thought back to Zinia, I didn’t remember, I repainted. And every time I repainted, a little more of the nasties disappeared. After enough years, what remained was not even a real memory. This was a portrait I made of one. Careful. Flattering. Mostly not true.
The Zinia in my head never fought me. He never said anything that went wrong. He was forever frozen in his best moments. Of course I missed it. I silently planned to miss him without even realizing I was doing it.
The actual Zinia though – she was the reason I stopped eating properly for months. Why doesn’t sleep come? Why have I crawled inside my own head for so long that I forgot what it felt like to exist normally. This was real. In fact, it all happened.
I knew it all along. And he missed her anyway.
Because the Zinia I built was much easier to love than the real thing.
Here’s the part that finally broke something in me. I didn’t miss Zinia at all. I missed who I was when he was around.
This is my version. He felt that everything was revealed. Whatever I felt, I felt it all the way, nothing at half volume. I called it love, but to be honest, it was more like slowly drowning, and I decided that drowning was the feeling of true depth.
I laughed with him in a different way. He moved differently. Like I was more turned on somehow. And when it was over, that person was simply gone. She went with it as if it had always been part of her life and never really mine.
No one talks about this grief. Losing yourself to the other person. Losing who you were in that specific relationship, in that particular version of your own life.
I was in it for so long that I mourned Zinia. He lies awake thinking about her. Review old conversations. And all the while I was actually grieving a version of myself that didn’t come back. This is a completely different loss, and for a long time there were no words for it.
Then I ran into him again. Years later. Somewhere I couldn’t avoid. And within less than ten minutes of standing there talking, I noticed something very quiet within me. Nothing dramatic. The woman in front of me had almost nothing to do with the one I had been carrying with me the whole time. The nostalgia didn’t stop. It didn’t even sting. It just went bad, like a feeling that ended before I could catch up.
Driving home, I kept getting off at the same place – I never missed Zinia. A character I wrote was missing. For years I was in love with my story about him.
What we had was real. The love was real. But you can genuinely love someone and still be genuinely awful together. Both things can live in the same relationship at the same time. I couldn’t stand it for a long time. I kept reaching for a clearer story. Either it was beautiful and the ending ruined it, or it was broken from the beginning. Both are easier than sitting with what is actually true.
What’s really true is that it was true love, and it’s impossible, and both of those things happened all the time. The good times were real. The damage was also real. it mattered. This too had to end.
He was a person. We loved each other. It wasn’t enough. This chapter is closed.
And the truth, even if quieter than the story I lived inside, is much easier to carry.
About Selim Hayder
Selim Hayder writes essays about memory, grief, identity, and the unspoken parts of human existence—anxiety, silence, time, loss, and what it means to exist in the gap between who we are and who we show the world. No advice. There are no answers. Just honest writing that explores what it feels like to be alive. More here: haydervoice.com.
