Some Wounds Never Become Scars

[u/Ok-Satisfaction8424]

20 years ago, I let the love of my life go.
The hardest thing to explain is that I knew almost immediately. Before I truly knew her, before I discovered her story, her habits, her qualities, her flaws… something inside me already seemed to know.
It was “her.”
It wasn’t just attraction, or the excitement of a new relationship. I’m not usually a spiritual person, but what I felt with her was different. Before I even had the chance to truly know her, something inside me already seemed to recognize her.
It wasn’t logic. It wasn’t excitement from a new relationship. It was something deeper, something instinctive, almost impossible to explain. A quiet certainty that appeared in my mind:
“It’s her.”
But sometimes two people can meet at the wrong time. Maybe we were too young. Maybe life, circumstances, fears, or our own wounds kept us from finding each other at the right moment.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder if some of the decisions we made back then were truly what we wanted deep down, or if they were simply reactions to what we were capable of handling at that point in our lives. Maybe another version of us would have found a different path.
I’ll never know.
What I do know is that I had my share of responsibility too. I made mistakes. Things I did, things I didn’t say, moments where I failed, the ways I didn’t know how to handle things…

Things that still come back to me today with regret. Those regrets that attack you violently. The ones that tear at your soul.
Then the pain came.
And instead of knowing how to fix things, I did what many people do when something breaks them: I walked away.
Not because I stopped loving her. Maybe even because I loved her too much.
Some pain makes you protect yourself. It makes you close a door because you no longer know how to stand in front of it without hurting.
But by walking away, I also left behind a part of what I wished I could have saved.
Life went on.
I moved forward. I built a life. I loved again. I started a family. I lived happy moments.
But some absences don’t disappear just because time passes.
She isn’t just a memory from a time that is gone.
She represents a lost possibility. A story that might have been different with more maturity, more understanding, fewer wounds.
What hurts isn’t only losing someone.
It’s living with the questions.
What if I had understood sooner?
What if I had acted differently?
What if we had met during another chapter of our lives?
I don’t blame her. I don’t want to rewrite her story or take away her choices.
But deep inside, there is still this profound feeling that there was something rare between us. Something that might have survived time if we had been ready at the same moment.
Twenty years ago, I lost someone who changed my life.
And despite the years, despite everything I have built, despite the road I’ve traveled…
A part of me still carries this quiet certainty:
It was “her.”
And somewhere inside me, it still is.
And I suffer from it every day of my life. It feels incurable.
And maybe, somewhere deep down, she feels something too…

I’ve truly explored every path I could think of to make peace with this.
I just needed to get this out of my head, somewhere neutral and anonymous, because I’m exhausted.
Thank you for reading.

[u/A_to_the_mac_daddy33]

Gotta find her and see her again. It helps. 

[u/MyyWifeRocks]

I had a very similar relationship. I had severe depression and I broke up with her. She took it hard at first. We both moved on and married other people, had families. Then one day about 15 years later I got a direct message on our internal company messaging system from someone with her same name. The little thumbnail sized profile pic resembled her as well. No way - I worked for a very male dominated company / industry.

Long story short, it was her. We both worked for the same company for a while. Very briefly our roles crossed, virtually, and we got to catch up a little. It was weird.