Sometimes I go on my boyfriend’s mom’s Instagram and scroll too far down, into years that don’t belong to me. Old videos, blurry birthday parties, grainy Christmas mornings, backyard summers with oversaturated sunlight. And there he is, younger. Skinny wrists, bright eyes, holding a guitar like he thought music could save him from becoming a person. He looked happier then. Not fake happy. Not surviving. Real happy. Like he still believed his life was waiting for him somewhere.

And I sit there staring at him like a missing person.

What the fuck happened to him?

I try to trace it backwards like a detective at a crime scene. Family trauma. Leaving the church. Divorce. Becoming an adult. Realizing freedom isn’t freedom when you’re exhausted all the time. Realizing love doesn’t heal people the way movies promised it would. Then there’s me. I happened to him too.

Two years ago he fell in love with me and I know I changed him. For better, probably. I know I bring softness out of him nobody else gets to see. I know he laughs harder with me sometimes. I know I’ve held him together on nights where he would’ve disappeared into himself completely. But there are ugly thoughts that crawl in after midnight and refuse to die.

Maybe he’d be happier without me.

Maybe he’d feel lighter. Maybe he’d have more freedom. Maybe he wouldn’t have gained forty, forty-five pounds. He says he’s not fat, and he isn’t, not really, but I know he misses himself sometimes. I know he misses the muscle, the sharpness, the feeling of being wanted by the world instead of consumed by it. Maybe if he loved someone else he’d try harder. Dress better. Eat cleaner. Pick up the guitar again. Maybe another girl would’ve inspired him into becoming the version of himself that survives in those old photos.

Sometimes I look at the videos and his family seems so unbearably happy it makes me sick. Not perfect, just alive. Everyone still sitting at the same table. Everyone still believing in each other. Before time started rotting things quietly from the inside.

And I wonder if one day somebody will look at pictures of us like this too. Like evidence from before the collapse.

But I can’t look at myself the same way. I wish I could step outside my own life and see it objectively, framed neatly in little squares like Instagram memories. I wish I could study myself from a distance and say: there, that’s where she started disappearing. That’s where the light changed.

But my old pictures don’t feel real. Half of them are gone anyway. Deleted, lost, buried in dead phones and broken accounts. I never had that kind of happy family archive to scroll through endlessly. Maybe I did once, but it faded earlier than his. Mine started falling apart before I even knew how to be a child properly. I grew up too fast. Faster than him. Faster than everyone around me. Like my body understood before my brain did that something bad was coming.

I gained weight first too. More noticeably. It hit me harder. Maybe because girls are watched more carefully. Maybe because sadness settles differently inside women’s bodies. Sometimes I look at old photos of myself and feel grief so intense it embarrasses me. Not because I was prettier, but because she still thought life was about to begin.

What happened to me?

Sometimes I think adulthood is just watching everyone slowly become unrecognizable. Watching people trade pieces of themselves for survival until all that’s left are habits and exhaustion and grocery lists and notifications. Sometimes I think love itself changes people beyond repair. Not always in bad ways. Just permanent ways.

I don’t know. Maybe nobody stays the person they were at nineteen. Maybe happiness always looks more real in old videos because nobody filming realizes they’re recording something that’s already dying.

Sometimes I close the app and look at the ceiling for a long time afterward, feeling like I’ve just visited ghosts.