Time does not heal, it only edits.

If memory were honest, I would never miss half the people I grieve.

I was lying flat on the rough concrete of the rooftop.
The sky was dissolving into gold, the sun was gonna set.
The sky looked familiar I couldn’t remember where from.
Clouds mimicking the fur of my late dog,
birds returning home…

Home.

I have always loved sunsets for this reason.
They make departures look gentle.
They make endings look like art.
One passing bird and the next…

their laughter appeared in the sky.

Faces, laughter, giggles, women, men, walls, flowers, poems, songs; amidst this all. Me.

Laughter is a bad historian, it makes us feel that the past was kinder than it was.

Suddenly I was walking through corridors that did not exist on that rooftop.
A quiet museum built entirely out of what I once felt.
The lights were dim but tender, focused only on certain exhibits.

Entire galleries had opened without warning.
Old friends sat on wooden benches, laughing in loops that never reached the fights that ended them.
My parents were younger in these frames, softer somehow, their tiredness edited out like an inconvenient stain.
Random relatives appeared like background music… familiar faces I once rolled my eyes at, now glowing with a strange gentleness.
Teachers walked past me in slow motion, their voices echoing encouragement, never the sharpness.

Everyone was curated.
Everyone was forgiven without being asked.

It was as if memory had applied the same golden filter to every relationship I had ever survived.

I stood there, confused.
Missing people I had once outgrown.
Missing versions of them that perhaps never truly existed.

Even the ones who had hurt me the most were displayed like misunderstood characters in a tragic play.
Their cruelty rewritten as circumstance.
Their absence reframed as destiny.

I kept trying to locate the evidence,
the exact moment they became “bad” in my story.
But the museum had erased all crime scenes.
Only softened narratives remained.

And the more I walked,
the more I saw and eventually missed.

There he was
in glass frames of old leaves.
Words preserved like fresh white roses.
His hands in mine, displayed like fragile artifacts no one is allowed to touch anymore.

Some rooms were locked.
Some had polite “Under Renovation” signs.
Painful scenes wrapped in black sheets like abandoned furniture, I did not dare to unwrap.

A voice, exactly like mine… just calmer, kept whispering beside me,
This wasn’t so bad. Look how pretty it looks now.

My memory runs a restoration project on people who once broke me.
It smooths their roughness, softens their shadows,
no bruises visible in the final cut.

I keep revisiting emotional crime scenes
long after someone has cleaned the blood.

I am not homesick. I am pain-sick.

Longing is the most persuasive gaslighter I have ever known.
The past keeps calling me back with a voice it never had while I was living it.

It’s all so golden houry inside this museum.
I was seeing these people after decades,
seeing myself like this after years.
I miss…

A glass vase falls.
Glass everywhere.

Oh.
I know this vase.
It… he…
All of a sudden smoke fills the room.
Lights begin to flicker.
Blood beads at the edge of my heel.
I don’t even remember stepping on anything.

A chill runs through me suddenly. And I wake up.
The sky above has turned darker.
I missed the sunset.
The gold is gone.
Only a faint ash-blue remains like the aftermath of something that once burned beautifully.

It strikes me then how deceptive emotional weather can be.
The past feels like winter sunlight,
cold in reality, golden in recollection.

Memory documents sunsets
and forgets the war.

Time has a way of turning storms into poetry
and calling it growth.

The brain is not loyal to facts it is loyal to survival.

Time never heals actually.
It edits, reduces, rearranges.
It blurs the violence so the nervous system can keep functioning.

Healing sometimes looks like amnesia.

The wind on the rooftop has grown colder now.
Somewhere downstairs a light switches off.
Somewhere inside me another realization switches on.

The sky above is completely dark.
And I am still lying here
awake inside a story
my mind refuses to end.

Wait what is this blood?
He is gone.
Where could the glass possibly be left.
Why does the wound feel fresh?

I can’t write conclusions, sorry if you are searching for any.
I write from rooftops, ruins, and recoveries.
You can sit beside these thoughts whenever you need.

With warmth,
-A.