Loving While Lost

There are two men I loved when I was young, and some part of me has never fully let them go.

That used to embarrass me. It still does sometimes.

Too much time has passed, I tell myself. They moved on. They built lives; they became memories in the natural way people do. So what does it say about me that they still live somewhere inside me?

For years, I answered that question cruelly. It says I’m damaged — that something in me was broken in a way others weren’t. It says I carry too much baggage — that I am too much, that any new love would eventually feel the weight of all that I hadn’t let go.

But I’m starting to wonder if that story has always been too harsh

The first love belonged to summer and youth. We were in our twenties, neither of us fully out, both still trying to understand ourselves. It was magical in the way first real love often is — he was on the stage, I was in the pit with my cello, and somewhere between the rehearsals and the performances, we found each other. A rush of secret glances across the footlights, the electric hum of being chosen. I was alive. I was seen.

The second came later and lasted longer. By then I was out, and so was he. Our life was steadier, warmer, more grounded — we’d trade soundtrack recordings and stack books on the same nightstand, and when he held me I felt something I hadn’t expected: protected. Like the world was smaller and safer inside whatever we’d built.

They each gave me something rare and human: the knowledge that I could be fully myself with another person and still be wanted.

I lost them both.

One relationship faded while something beautiful was still there. Later, when there was a chance to reconnect, I was depressed and distant, unable to be present in the way I wish I had been. The other ended because life was moving for him while I was standing still—confused, scared, unsure what came next for me.

I have spent years believing I ruined both.

Maybe I made mistakes. I’m sure I did. But I also see now that I was young, carrying things I didn’t know how to name yet: fear, depression, uncertainty, the quiet weight so many gay men carried in those years.

Maybe I wasn’t ruining love. Maybe I was trying to love while hurting.

What lingers now is not only the loss of those men. It is also the loss of who I was then. With the first, time seemed to stop in the best possible way — life felt perfect, complete, needing nothing beyond that summer. With the second, I was out of school and lost, no map for what came next, scared in ways I couldn’t articulate. And yet beside him, none of that chaos touched me. Love was the one place I knew exactly where I was. But they both had something I didn’t: a sense of where they were going. And eventually, that gap became its own kind of distance. Sometimes we think we miss a person, when we also miss the self we were beside them — the self who, however briefly, felt like enough.

And yes, if I am honest, they still remain perfect in my memory.

Not because they were flawless, but because they met me so deeply at a time when I needed love most. That kind of memory is hard to compete with.

But I am realizing that I don’t have to compete with it.

I am choosing to cherish what was beautiful, forgive what was broken, and stop calling myself damaged for having loved deeply. Those men are not proof that my best years are behind me.

They are proof that I was capable of love then.

Which means I am capable of it still.

Are you holding on to long lost love?