Looking back at the people in my life, I see a mix of paths. Some are still here. Some were only with me for a season. And others were clearly there for a reason, even if the reasons were not always positive.
What surprises me most are the ones who return. Not in real life, but in my thoughts and dreams. They come back with all the good and all the bad, but dreams rarely keep those things separate. They blend them, stretch them, and amplify them until the emotions feel sharper than anything I ever felt when the moments were real.
There are nights when I am relieved to wake up.
Not because I fear the past, but because sleep has a way of reminding me that unfinished stories never fully go away. They wait. They echo. They hint at the things we still carry, even when we believe we have moved on.
Maybe that is the quiet truth about “reason, season, lifetime.”
The categories are never as clean as we want them to be.
People leave our lives, but the meaning they left behind keeps shifting. Some lessons grow softer over time. Others stay sharp. And some return only when we are ready to understand them differently.
I used to think dreams were just the mind’s way of sorting old memories.
Now I see them as reminders.
Not of the people themselves, but of who we were when we knew them and who we have become since.
Sometimes the most meaningful growth happens long after someone is gone.
