There is a cruelty in looking back at youth: it appears brighter than it ever was, sharper at the edges, as though time itself has polished its fragments while leaving the present dull. I remember the days when every hour felt charged, when love seemed both inevitable and indestructible, when we believed we could hold one another outside of time. We were wrong, of course, but wrongness then carried its own intoxication.

What strikes me most is not what we did, but how convinced we were that it mattered. Each gesture seemed final, definitive, as though the world were a stage built solely for our experiments in love and cruelty. The smallest word could pierce, the smallest kindness could redeem. Now I see those same gestures as fragile, provisional — the rehearsals of people who did not yet know their own limits.

And yet, part of me envies that blindness. Youth allowed us to mistake intensity for permanence, desire for destiny. We lived inside a fever without recognising it as such. Perhaps that is why it glows so brightly now in memory: because we never knew we were burning out.

There are songs that carry that illusion — the reckless belief that feeling is enough to secure a future. They played in the background then, and they still return now, in shops, in passing cars, in the shuffle of a playlist. When they arrive, I feel both a pang and a strange gratitude. For those songs remind me that once, at least once, I believed completely.

But what is youth, if not the practice of believing too much? We handed out promises like matches, striking them against any surface, marvelling at the flame, ignoring the burn. Now I see the ashes, the charred remains of those brief infernos, and I wonder whether it was waste or necessity. Did we need to set fire to ourselves in order to learn the shape of endurance?

I think of us then: how certain I was that your eyes held an answer, how easily I mistook silence for depth, distance for mystery. I see now that you were as uncertain as I, perhaps more so. But in my memory you remain larger than life, a figure clothed in inevitability, because memory insists on myth where reality offers only fragments.

And yet, despite everything, I do not resent it. Youth is not meant to be wise. It is meant to wound and to dazzle, to leave behind scars we later read like scripture. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the pulse of those reckless days — wild, unmeasured, impossible. It hurts, yes. But the hurt carries its own sweetness, as though reminding me: you lived once without caution, you loved once without armour.

Perhaps that is all youth is — not a period of time, but a texture, a rhythm of the heart that eventually breaks under its own weight. And when it breaks, it leaves behind the faint echo of a song: half triumphant, half tragic, but undeniably ours.