The Wrong Dish

I spent a long time trying to understand why someone’s presence hit me so hard.

I kept circling it, as if there had to be a deeper meaning.

A message.
A spark.
A lesson.
Something.

I thought I had complicated feelings about them.

Turns out I just had complicated feelings about possibility.

Sometimes you meet someone who moves through the world like everything is still ahead of them. And if you cross paths with them at the wrong moment in your own life, you can mistake their momentum for your own. You start believing they woke something up in you, or opened a door you couldn’t open by yourself.

But they didn’t create anything.

They were just the nearest reminder of what you’d forgotten:

that you still had a future.
that you still had options.
that your life wasn’t finished.

And here’s the part people don’t like to say out loud:

They may not be the friend you need.
You may not spend much time with them at all.
Your lives may not overlap in any meaningful way after the moment passes.

Because their role was never to stay.

It was to reveal something.

And you have to be careful in that space.

Because when you’re hungry for emotional food, you’ll eat almost anything that looks nourishing. You’ll assign meaning to the nearest source of energy. You’ll mistake possibility for connection, momentum for intimacy, inspiration for closeness.

But the wrong dish can spoil your appetite.

Possibility can get tangled with longing if you’re not paying attention. It can feel like affection, or destiny, or something else entirely, when really it’s just your own life trying to get your attention through someone else’s.

So here’s what I’ve learned:

Don’t confuse the person with the spark.
Don’t hand them credit for a future that belongs to you.
Don’t turn a reminder into a storyline.

Some people don’t enter your life to stay.
They enter to point.
To illuminate.
To mark a fork in the road you didn’t realize you’d ignored.

And the moment you understand that, the whole thing settles.

It was never about them.
It was about possibility.
And possibility was yours the entire time.