Magna Erimus ...

I don’t really know how the mind works, but sometimes it brings people back to you in the most unexpected ways.

One of the people I know who is never on social media recently appeared in my dream. It caught me off guard because he wasn’t even on my mind when I went to sleep.

There’s a story here.

He was someone who once introduced me to what heartbreak feels like. I don’t hold it against him,we were both young, figuring things out. Life happened the way it did. We moved on, even if not in a fully clean or spoken way.

I remember when he left the country for his studies. We used to talk about graduation, about what life would look like when that season finally came. At some point, there was even talk of me joining him to celebrate his graduation.

That graduation is now here. In a week or so, he completes that chapter of his life. And I hear, through the quiet distance of time,that he has done very well. An excellent student, just as we once spoke about in passing dreams and teenage certainty.

We once had a phrase between us: Magna erimus, amica mea, we shall be great, my friend.

The last time we saw each other, around early 2024, it was clear that the friendship as we knew it no longer existed. The “amica mea” part had quietly fallen away. But somehow, the words we shall be great remained intact. And it seems he has held up his end of that quiet promise.

I am proud of that,from where I stand now.

Then there is the mind. Funny place.

He appeared in my dream last night. Not as he was when I last knew him, but as a slightly altered version,older, different, even with hair that I don’t remember him having, tied in a ponytail. The mind has its own creativity, I guess.

What unsettled me wasn’t even the dream itself. It was waking up and seeing his face again somewhere in my day, as if the dream had followed me into the morning.

Life is strange like that.

Recently, I have also been listening to Nyashinski’s music a lot. And that, too, opens a different door in my memory.

I realize I no longer speak to the person who first introduced me to that music either. And yet, when I hear those songs, I am taken back to a time that felt lighter. A time of music without weight. Of living without fully understanding what was coming next.

“You’re beautiful” plays, and suddenly I am not just listening to a song. I am remembering a version of life. A version of myself. A version of connection that no longer exists, but once did.

And I think that’s the thing about people and seasons,we don’t always realize when we are in the middle of them. We only recognize them clearly once they’ve ended.

I don’t think everyone is meant to stay in our lives forever. But I do think there are people who leave pieces of themselves behind in us, and we leave pieces of ourselves in them too.

The only danger in knowing that is how easily it can make us start treating people like temporary things. Like we don’t need to hold them too carefully because they might not stay.

But maybe the real lesson is not detachment. Maybe it is presence.

To love people fully while they are here. To speak honestly while there is still time. To not assume forever, but also not withhold today.

Because life is strange in that way,you can go to sleep with no thought of someone, and wake up with their face quietly sitting in your memory again.

And maybe that’s not confusion.

Maybe that’s just being human.