There is a quiet terror in realizing that love is not confined to time. That some people, even in their absence, remain architecturally embedded in you - not as ghosts, but as structures. Load-bearing and foundational. She is that for me.

They say our cells regenerate every seven years, but I think, science forgets to account for the way memory preserves what biology forgets. If cellular memory was purely chemical, then explain my friend, why my fingers, in idle movement, still trace her name on every tabletop. Why the back of my throat still tightens at the sound of her voice in someone else's laughter.

It’s easy to call this obsession and to forget to accept it as structural permanence.

We met in the kind of way that belongs to literature, not real life of a 15 year old Indian girl. We were teenagers and I loved her in a way that defied categorisation of love into anything remotely close to gender, not as rebellion, not as label, but as inevitability. I became she-shaped. I would like to call it a metaphysical event.

Somewhere between our classroom desks and those thin, pale yellow walls of borrowed tuition rooms, we built a world only we lived in. I’ve studied anatomy, read enough neurology to understand how hormones, memory, and mirror neurons function. But none of that prepares you for what it feels like to look at someone and know - in the most unscientific, unprovable sense - that your nervous systems are co-writing each other.

She lives inside my metaphors not because I haven’t moved on, but because she is the lens through which my broken language first learned to ache properly.

In 2004, researchers at University College London published a study on flashbulb memories: those unusually vivid, emotionally charged moments that imprint themselves with photographic clarity. The amygdala, it turns out, encodes emotional events with disproportionate intensity, anchoring them in identity formation. Love, especially of our kind, transgressive love experienced in secret, operates under the same neurological conditions as trauma. Both rewrite the architecture of the self.

The Greeks had a word, phantasia, meaning the soul’s capacity to imagine what is absent as though it were present. She is my phantasia.

Even now, years later, I catch myself comparing every new intimacy to her; not in the sense of wanting her back, but in the sense that she calibrated my standard for intimacy of any kind. I don’t believe in soulmates. But I do believe some people rearrange your internal compass so thoroughly that even when you grow, you grow around them, the way trees grow around fences. I’ve forgotten most of what I studied about becoming a surgeon. But I remember how she laughed when I told her I wanted to hold hearts for a living. She said, “You already do.” That was the first time I felt like my existence could be a profession. That love, itself, could be a profession.

The Upanishads speak of Hridaya, the heart, not as organ, but as the chair of consciousness, where feeling and thought become indistinguishable. In this framework, to hold someone in your heart is not a metaphor. 

Sometimes I think my body is a reliquary, and she is the sacred object I carry through time. I walk into supermarkets and smell soap that reminds me of her, citrusy, precise, and suddenly I am 15 again, listening to September Song, back in that tiny classroom where we learned gravity but not what to do when two people become one.