I miss the days when my mistakes only impacted me.
When a wrong note ended in my own chest and nowhere else.
When failure was contained, personal, almost merciful in its smallness.
I didn’t have to wonder who else who feel it. I didn’t have to trace the ripple through other people’s lives, their nights, their sense of safety.
Back then, if I fell, I fell alone. And somehow that felt lighter.
But there’s another thing I miss, and it’s harder to name.
I miss the days when we worked in unison. When it was us against the problem, not each of us carrying our own private weight.
Her and I moved like a duet. Different instruments, same tempo. We could pass the melody back and forth without thinking. One of us would falter and the other would instinctively fill the space.
Mistakes didn’t feel dangerous then. They felt shared. Absorbed. Held between us.
There was a kind of safety in the harmony – not being nothing went wrong, but because nothing went wrong alone.
Now, responsibility has edges. Mistakes don’t just bruise, they echo. They land in rooms I’m not in. They show up as silences I can’t fix. They ask questions I don’t always have the courage to answer.
And the hardest part isn’t carrying the weight myself. It’s carrying it without the counterbalance of someone moving in step beside me.
I don’t romanticize those earlier days. I know they weren’t perfect. I know unison doesn’t mean ease. But there was something sacred about knowing that when one of us drifted, the other was still holding the rhythm. That we were tuned to each other, even when the song got hard.
The violin understands this kind of loss. How two strings, once vibrating together, can still sound beautiful on their own, but never quite forget the resonance they created side by side.
I miss the simplicity of mistakes that stopped with me. And I miss, even more, the days when they didn’t have to.
When the melody was shared. When the weight was divided. When the silence between notes still belonged to us.
And now, there is no song.
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