Rip & Render

I was smoothing down the corner of a paper butterfly this morning when my thumb caught on a snippet of old text pasted near the top—“And this place is our meeting point...” It stopped me mid-motion, right next to a little sticker that read “live in the moment.”
We used to have so many meeting points. The coffee shop on the corner where we’d sit for hours over lukewarm cups, the quiet park bench, the endless late-night chats that felt like they’d never run out of road. Back then, I used to think memories were like paper collages—something you could carefully layer, pin in place with binder clips, and keep safe from fading.
But somewhere between the busy workweeks and the unread messages, our meeting points just became places I walk past on my own. We didn’t have a big fallout. There was no shouting, no dramatic goodbye. Just a slow, quiet drift until one day, the routine of us simply... stopped.
I added a little ticket stub to the page, stamped with the word Butterfly, wondering if you ever look back at those old places and feel that same quiet tug. At the bottom of the spread, there’s a small printed phrase: a true love story never ends.
I used to believe that meant two people staying together forever. Now I wonder if it just means some people stay with you long after they’ve walked away—living quietly in the margins of everything you make.

I found a book page pressed between dried flowers last week, tucked inside a card I meant to send two years ago. The edges were already turning yellow, paper going brittle around a sentence I had underlined in soft pencil: “...without enough members, we probably wouldn’t get to function as a real society.”
We used to have our own little society, didn't we? Just two people sitting on the rug, pressing wild daisies between the heaviest books we could find on the shelf. We promised to save every memory, every ordinary Tuesday, holding onto things before they could fade.
Then life got louder, or maybe we just got quieter around each other. The daily calls turned into weekly texts, then to brief updates, until eventually we only remembered to reach out on birthdays or name days. I kept making things with my hands—tying dried stems with rough twine, pasting torn pages onto craft paper—hoping that keeping physical pieces of the past would somehow hold the people together, too.
Yesterday, I almost wrote your name on the front. I held the pen for a long minute, watching the ink hover right over the paper, before I put the cap back on and slid the card back into the drawer.
Funny how we can preserve a bloom for years after it dies, but we never quite learn how to keep a simple conversation alive.