Somewhere along the way

There are people who enter your life all at once.

And then there are people who have always been there.

The second kind are dangerous.

Because you never notice the exact moment they become important.

One day they're just a part of your life.

A familiar face.

A familiar voice.

A familiar name that appears so often you stop paying attention to it.

And then, years later, you find yourself searching for that name in a crowd.

Waiting for a notification.

Saving a conversation you know you'll read again.

Funny, isn't it?

How life never tells you when something is about to change.

It just lets ordinary moments pile up until one day you look back and realize they were never ordinary at all.

Maybe that's why I can't tell you where this story begins.

Was it a wedding?

A conversation?

A message?

Or was it somewhere in between?

All I know is that by the time I realized what had happened, it was already too late to pretend it hadn't.