The People You Cannot Keep

Sometimes while you’re scrolling through social media and suddenly you see an old photo, or you hear a song, and all of a sudden you remember someone you hadn’t seen in years. Just for a second. As if someone had turned on a light in a room you hadn’t visited in a long time.

And in that second you feel something. It’s not exactly sadness. It’s something softer. It’s something like touching the edge of a memory that no longer belongs to you in the same way.

What you didn’t know is that this moment has a very human explanation. And it has a lot to do with how your brain connects us to others.

The brain can’t handle everyone

Have you ever wondered why there are people who, over time, simply disappear from your life without anyone having done anything wrong? It’s not because you didn’t matter to them. It’s because your brain, literally, has a limit to how many people it can keep alive in your memory.

It’s as if you had a round table in your head, and there are only a certain number of chairs. When life brings new people, some chairs get freed almost without you noticing. It’s not a decision you make. It’s something that just happens.

And it’s not only about how many people you know. It’s about how much energy your mind can dedicate to each one. Those who occupy that closest space, that small table of five chairs, are the people with whom you maintain a deep connection. You talk to them frequently. You think about them. You feel them close, even when they are far away.

After those five people, there’s another layer: someone you know well, with whom you share something real, but maybe you didn’t talk this week. And beyond those, there’s another layer, and another. Each one larger than the previous. But all of them together have a limit. A limit you didn’t impose.

Why we forget without wanting to forget

It’s no coincidence that when you stop talking to someone for a long time, that person starts to blur in your mind. Your brain is not an archive where everything is stored forever. It’s more like a garden: what doesn’t get watered slowly dries out.

Every time you think about someone, imagine them, mention them in a conversation, you’re “watering” that memory. You’re keeping it alive. But when contact disappears, when life pulls your attention elsewhere, that memory begins to lose color. Not all at once. Over time.

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Your mind doesn’t forget out of carelessness. It forgets in order to keep connecting.

And this doesn’t mean that person wasn’t worth it. It means your mind is doing what it has always done: trying to survive with what it has. It’s not betrayal. It’s simply how we’re made.

The people who become invisible

Maybe while reading this you’re thinking of someone like that. That person you met at university and with whom you shared something important. Or that coworker who made you laugh on the hardest days. Or someone you met on a trip and who, at that moment, felt like they would stay forever.

Sometimes they go away for very simple reasons. Someone gets a new job. Someone moves. Life goes on and time does what it always does: it separates.

And the most curious thing is that, despite living in an era where you can find almost anyone on a screen, there are people who simply seem to have disappeared. As if the world were bigger than it seems. As if, at some point, that person stopped being in the version of life you’re living now.

Small gesture, real connection

But there is something you can do. Something very simple that has a power you might not imagine.

Think of that person who pops into your mind out of nowhere. The one you haven’t seen in years, but when you remember them you feel that at some point they were important to you. You don’t have to do anything big. Just this:

Not with fear. With love.

It doesn’t have to be the person you spent the most time with. Nor the one who knows you best. It can be someone who simply, at one point in your life, made you feel that you were okay. That you didn’t need to explain yourself. That you could be there without fear of being judged.

It’s as if the world were reminding you, in the quietest way possible, that those connections you had were real. That they don’t disappear in the same way ink disappears from paper under the sun.

Time doesn’t forgive, we know that. But it doesn’t have to be something that fills us with fear. It can be the reason why today, in this moment, we decide not to let someone who mattered become just a memory that no one waters.

So if there’s someone who just appeared in your mind while you were reading this, maybe that’s the sign you needed.