1.
Some loves leave traces that look like marks and bruises on your soul.
Long after she said "enough", memories and pain continued to circle around her like birds of prey, waiting for her weakest moment to take her off guard.
After a hiatus of ten years, Sheela retraced her steps and went back to him.
They were together five years longer, and then broke up again.
Sheela was left reeling from the blow, free falling in a precipice from a high point of total loss.
This free fall continued for two years longer.
Then, again, they spoke for about a month, until she realized he had not a clue about who she was. And maybe, he had never had.
The realization came upon her all of a sudden, and she just said: "This is it."
And this time she stuck to it.
Yet, this trace, this strange ghost that almost became embodied out of its own independent will was what stayed on: the memory of love.
2.
She often surprised herself in this whirlwind of old thoughts, loops, shards of memories, only to understand how ephemeral it all was.
Two years ago, on this day, they were visiting a central European city together, or they stood beneath the wind turbine blades that dotted a naked mountainside at a lonely location; or again, some fifteen years back, they had had a pick-nick in a city park... and on and on down the whirlwind of random memories, spiralling into the meanders of an aching heart.
She went on this way until she realized the loop was broken: in the end, all it took was a second of illumined realization, and she was free at last to go her own way.
What stayed was not the other.
It was the person she had become in the process of walking towards herself again: the memory of love.
3.
The time came when she realized she was another, and could no longer recognize her former self-image.
Down below layers of beliefs and illusions, she ended up realizing she was a beautiful stranger to herself; she understood that she had outgrown obsolete versions of who she thought she was. And she got excited again: to know herself for the very first time, and celebrate her life.
When she had come home to herself, that memory of love turned into a thin trail in an old black and white picture that surprised a little her estranged new self.
She was another. And she had crossed the bridge: she was now on the other side of the memory of love.
