“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.” ~Doug Larson
I don’t miss Zinia.
I miss the Zinia I made up.
The real Zinia—the one who fought with me for hours over things that became bigger than they should have, who said things I told myself I’d never forgive, who was wrong for me in ways I kept pretending weren’t there—I got rid of all of that somewhere along the way.
I kept the laugh. The chemistry. The way she got my humor without me having to explain it. The conversations that ran till Fajr and still didn’t feel finished. Everything else I quietly dropped without noticing I was doing it.
I then spent years missing that version. Like she was something I lost.
She wasn’t something I lost. She was something I built.
Memory doesn’t preserve things. It rewrites them. Every time I went back to think about Zinia, I wasn’t remembering—I was repainting. And each time I repainted her, a little more of the ugly stuff faded out. After enough years, what I had left wasn’t even a real memory. It was a portrait I’d made of one. Careful. Flattering. Mostly not true.
The Zinia in my head never fought with me. Never said anything that landed wrong. Just stayed frozen at her best moments forever. Of course I missed her. I’d been quietly designing her to be missed for years without ever noticing that’s what I was doing.
The actual Zinia, though—she was why I stopped eating properly for months. Why sleep just wouldn’t come. Why I spent so long crawling around inside my own head that I forgot what it felt like to just exist normally. That was real. All of that actually happened.
I knew it the whole time. And still missed her anyway.
Because the Zinia I built was so much easier to love than the real one ever managed to be.
Here’s the part that finally broke something open in me. I wasn’t missing Zinia at all. I was missing who I was when she was still around.
That version of me. Everything felt turned up. Whatever I was feeling, I was feeling all the way, nothing at half volume. I called it love, but honestly, it was more like drowning slowly and deciding that drowning was just what real depth felt like.
I laughed differently with her around. Moved differently. Like I was more switched on somehow. And when it ended, that person just left. Went with her like he was always part of her life and never really mine.
Nobody talks about that grief. Losing yourself alongside the other person. Losing whoever you were inside that specific relationship, that specific version of your own life.
I spent so long convinced I was grieving Zinia. Lying awake thinking about her. Going over old conversations. And the whole time I was actually grieving a version of myself that wasn’t coming back. That’s a completely different loss, and I didn’t have words for it for a long time.
Then I ran into her again. Years later. Somewhere I had no way of avoiding. And within maybe ten minutes of standing there talking, I noticed something had gone very quiet inside me. Nothing dramatic. The woman in front of me just had almost nothing to do with whoever I’d been carrying around all this time. The nostalgia didn’t break. It didn’t even sting. It just went flat, like a feeling that had already finished before I caught up to it.
Driving home, I kept landing on the same thing—I was never missing Zinia. I was missing a character I wrote. I spent years in love with my own story about her.
What we had was real. The love was real. But you can love someone genuinely and still be genuinely awful together. Both things can live inside the same relationship at the same time. For a long time, I couldn’t hold that. I kept reaching for a cleaner story. Either it was beautiful and the ending ruined it, or it was broken from the start. Both easier than sitting with what was actually true.
What was actually true is that it was real love and it was also impossible, and both of those things were happening the whole time. The good moments were real. The damage was also real. It mattered. It also had to end.
She was a person. We loved each other. It wasn’t enough. That chapter is closed.
And the truth, even when it’s quieter than the story I’d been living inside, is a lot lighter to carry.
About Selim Hayder
Selim Hayder writes essays on memory, grief, identity, and the unspoken parts of being human — anxiety, silence, time, loss, and what it means to exist in the gap between who we are and who we show the world. No advice. No answers. Just honest writing that explores what it feels like to be alive. Read more at haydervoice.com.
