This is the bomblike feeling of having cared for someone who did not care for me at all. This is me having trusted someone who did not believe me when I told them a friend of theirs had wronged me. This is the sudden certainty that time would never change that unrequited trust in spite of recurring conversation. In spite of supposed recurring remembrance. I thought I had the past on my side with all these memories as credentials, but recurrence does not turn the old into new. I didn’t know it —or I didn’t want to know it—, but I was just a faint apparition, a harmless ghost climbing the same flight of stairs night after night.