Have We Met Before?

She first met Bobby in a seminar room that smelled like dust and burnt coffee.

The building was old enough to feel temporary, which comforted her. The walls were scuffed in a way that suggested many people had passed through with plans that no longer mattered. She had just moved to the city for her PhD—two suitcases, a sublet with a mattress on the floor, a desk borrowed from a friend of a friend, a sense that everything important was finally beginning. The department called it an orientation, but it felt more like a sorting. Everyone was being quietly placed somewhere, whether they knew it yet or not.

Bobby sat two seats away from her, legs stretched too far into the aisle, notebook closed as if he didn’t expect to need it. He was white, unmistakably so, but not polished. His jeans were worn soft at the knees. His shoes looked like they’d been chosen for comfort rather than signaling. His hair appeared to have been cut by someone who loved him but didn’t specialize in symmetry.

When the professor asked everyone to introduce themselves, Bobby went last.

“I’m Bobby,” he said. “I’m from New Hampshire. I don’t really know why I’m here yet, but I figured I’d find out.”

Some people laughed. Others didn’t. The professor smiled, indulgent but unsure.

She wrote his name in the margin of her notebook without meaning to, the letters slanted slightly upward, like something unfinished.

They started talking afterward because she asked him where in New Hampshire, and he said the name of a town she’d never heard of and didn’t expect to hear again. He asked where she was from, and when she answered, he didn’t follow it with a question that made her brace. He didn’t ask how she got there, or whether she planned to stay, or what her parents did. He just nodded, as if the information fit somewhere he already understood.

They walked together part of the way home. The late afternoon light caught on the edges of buildings, making the city look briefly forgiving. He told her he’d grown up with mountains close enough to disappear into, trails that didn’t require maps, a sense that you could walk long enough and eventually arrive somewhere quiet. She told him she’d grown up with ambition like a second language, something she didn’t remember learning but spoke fluently anyway. Neither of them framed these things as explanations. They were just facts.

Bobby was brilliant in a way that didn’t feel competitive. He didn’t hoard ideas. He didn’t perform certainty. When he spoke in class, it was often to say something sideways, something that didn’t quite land at first but made the room quiet for a moment before people realized they’d been handed a different angle. He didn’t seem invested in being right. He was interested in seeing where a thought could go if it wasn’t rushed.

He never seemed in a hurry.

That was part of what drew her to him. He didn’t act like time was something you could run out of, or like the future was something that needed to be managed aggressively. When deadlines loomed, he met them without drama. When they passed, he didn’t linger over them. He behaved as if there would always be another week, another semester, another chance to revise.

They started dating without announcing it. Dinners turned into mornings. Mornings turned into weekends. He slept over on nights when she was too tired to be impressive and stayed even when she wasn’t good company, when her sentences flattened and her thoughts felt pre-chewed by the day. He never seemed disappointed by the version of her that arrived at the end of things.

He read her drafts carefully, not to fix them, but to understand them. He asked questions that made her think rather than defend. She liked the way he circled ideas instead of staking claims. He liked the way she organized her life like it was something that mattered, like effort itself was a form of respect.

They fit easily, but not neatly. Their lives overlapped without collapsing into one another.

Bobby didn’t want much. He talked about teaching someday, maybe at the local college back home. Or working at the library. Or not working at all for a while—just reading, hiking, figuring things out. He said these things without irony or apology, as if wanting less were simply another orientation.

She listened, and tried not to translate. Tried not to hear absence as refusal, or stillness as lack of imagination.

She loved him, she realized, in a way that felt less like momentum and more like permission. With Bobby, she didn’t have to explain why she wanted what she wanted. He didn’t take it personally that her ambition wasn’t negotiable, that it had been there long before him and would remain long after.

But he didn’t share it.

At first, this didn’t feel like a problem. They were young. They were learning. Love, she believed, didn’t require parallel trajectories—just respect, curiosity, a willingness to walk together for as long as it made sense.

When she got her first fellowship, Bobby took her out for cheap Thai food and toasted her with a beer he couldn’t really afford. The restaurant was loud and forgiving. The plates were chipped.

“You’re going to change everything,” he said, smiling.

She thought he meant the field.

Later, when she got her first publication, he read it twice and asked her if she felt relieved or hollow. She hadn’t realized those were options. The question stayed with her longer than the acceptance email had.

When she started talking about postdocs, about leaving the city, about building a life that would require moving again and again, Bobby listened quietly. He didn’t argue. He didn’t insist. He didn’t ask her to stay. He just grew more translucent around the edges, like someone slowly stepping out of a photograph.

He started disappearing for days at a time—not emotionally, just geographically. Hiking trips that bled into weekdays. Long drives with no clear destination. He said he needed space to think. He said the mountains helped him breathe.

She gave it to him.

She told herself this was what trust looked like.

The first time she noticed the drugs, it wasn’t dramatic. It was a smell she didn’t recognize at first, faint and chemical. A softness in his attention that hadn’t been there before. He laughed more easily, but the laughter didn’t land the same way. It slipped out of him without anchoring.

She asked him about it once, carefully, as if tone alone could keep the question from becoming an accusation.

“It’s not a thing,” he said. “It’s just—sometimes.”

She believed him because she wanted to. Because wanting to believe is often mistaken for generosity.

They didn’t break up all at once. They thinned.

There was a stretch of months where they were together but no longer aligned, like two lines that had once overlapped and were now drifting apart so gradually it was hard to point to the moment divergence became distance. They still touched each other in familiar ways. They still used the same shorthand. But something essential had loosened, and neither of them knew how to tighten it again without tearing.

She finished her PhD. Bobby came to the defense and sat in the back, quiet and proud. He hugged her afterward and whispered, “I knew you would,” as if this outcome had never been in doubt.

When she accepted a job across the country, Bobby said, “That makes sense,” and meant it. He helped her pack. He carried boxes down the stairs without complaint.

They hugged for a long time before she left. Neither of them cried. It felt important not to, like crying would have implied a decision that neither of them had actually made.

They promised to stay in touch. They meant it.

For a while, they did. Emails that began with updates turned into messages that began with apologies. Calls were postponed, then missed, then rescheduled with vague optimism. Bobby moved back to New Hampshire. She moved into an apartment with windows that looked out over a city she hadn’t learned yet, a skyline that felt borrowed.

She advanced quickly. She published. She taught. She learned how to speak in rooms where she had once waited to be invited, how to phrase uncertainty so it sounded deliberate, how to be legible without being small. She learned which parts of herself were rewarded and which were merely tolerated.

She fell in love again—once with a man who admired her work and wanted to build a life around it, once with a woman who understood her exhaustion without needing it explained. These relationships were good in their own ways. They were adult. They were functional.

They were not Bobby.

She told herself this comparison was immature. She told herself that first loves often linger longer than they should.

Years passed.

She heard about Bobby through other people. Someone mentioned he’d been struggling. Someone else said he was “finding himself.” Someone said he’d had a scare, said it carefully, as if naming it more directly would make it contagious.

She didn’t ask for details.

The version of Bobby she carried with her was preserved carefully, like a pressed leaf slipped between the pages of a book she didn’t open anymore. She didn’t want it altered by information she couldn’t integrate.

The last time she saw him before the conference, she was thirty-two and he was already slipping away.

They met for coffee when she visited the city for a talk. Bobby was thinner. His hands shook when he lifted the cup. He talked too fast, then not at all, as if his thoughts were arriving in uneven waves.

He told her he was writing again. He said he’d stopped using. He said a lot of things. His sentences sometimes trailed off before reaching their conclusions.

She listened. She nodded. She did not interrupt.

When they hugged goodbye, she felt something in him that scared her—not danger, but absence. Like a room that had been emptied without anyone noticing.

After that, they stopped communicating entirely.

Years later, she was invited to speak at a regional conference in New England. She almost declined. She was tired. Travel felt heavy. But it was close to where Bobby lived, and some part of her believed proximity still meant something, that geography could summon memory.

The hotel bar was dim and loud. She recognized no one at first. Then she saw him.

Bobby was sitting alone at a small table, nursing a drink that looked like it had been there a long time. His hair was longer. His face sharper. There was a version of him she recognized immediately, and another she didn’t.

She approached slowly, like someone crossing ice that might not hold.

“Bobby?”

He looked up, eyes unfocused for a moment before sharpening into recognition that wasn’t quite recognition.

“Hey,” he said, smiling. “Sorry—do I know you?”

The question landed between them like a dropped glass. It made a sound even though nothing broke.

She laughed reflexively, then stopped when she realized he wasn’t joking.

“It’s me,” she said. She said her name.

He stared at her for a long time, as if the name were something he was testing for weight.

“Oh,” he said finally. “Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Sorry. I’m just—my brain’s a little fried these days.”

They sat together. He told her he’d been clean for a while now. He told her about a job he’d lost, about a room he’d slept in that wasn’t really his, about a girl he loved once who left because she wanted more.

She listened, trying not to hear herself in his story.

She told him about her work. About her students. About a book she was thinking of writing. He nodded, but she could tell the words weren’t landing the way they used to, that they were skimming rather than settling.

They were speaking adjacent languages now—close enough to recognize the shape of meaning, too far apart to share it fully.

At one point, he leaned back and studied her face with a kind of wonder.

“You seem… different,” he said.

She smiled. “So do you.”

He frowned, like he was trying to place something that kept slipping just out of reach.

“I feel like I knew you really well once,” he said. “But I can’t quite get there.”

Her chest tightened.

“We did,” she said.

He nodded slowly.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “But sometimes I can’t tell if I’m remembering things or just imagining them.”

She wanted to reach for his hand. She didn’t.

They hugged goodbye again, more briefly this time, as if their bodies already understood the limits of the moment.

As she walked back to her room, she realized she didn’t recognize herself either—not in the way she used to. The person who had loved Bobby was still inside her, but she no longer knew how to speak from that place without undoing everything she had built.

In the bathroom mirror, she studied her face.

The lines around her eyes were earned. Her posture was sure. She looked like someone who had survived.

But the version of herself that Bobby had loved—the woman who believed time was abundant, who hadn’t yet learned how much she would be required to become—felt distant, like a language she’d once been fluent in and now only half-understood.

She pressed her palm to the mirror.

Quietly, she asked herself, “Have we met before?”

The reflection did not answer.

The next morning, she gave her talk. People took notes. They asked smart questions. Someone told her she was inspiring.

On the flight home, she stared out the window and thought about how love can be a form of shared becoming—and how devastating it is when the becoming goes in different directions.

She did not regret Bobby.

She did not regret herself.

But she understood, finally, that there are people we love not because they stay, but because they teach us who we were when staying still was still possible.

And that recognition, once lost, does not always return.