I know every detail about every version of herself she has ever been.

I know the 6-year-old version who swallowed her name like a marble, who sat in the back of classrooms with her knees drawn up, thinking if she held herself small enough, still enough, maybe they wouldn’t see her. I know the 9-year-old who didn’t believe in God but prayed anyway, who thought love was what happened when someone stayed, even when she cried too hard at the wrong times.

There’s the 13-year-old who tried on other people’s laughter like clothes that didn’t fit, her tongue sharp and aching in the mirror. And the 15-year-old who learned silence like a second language, fluent in walking home in the rain without saying a word about it.

I know her, and I know her ghost. She’s always dying in my chest. Every version of her burns quietly in the back of my throat—ashes, whispers, a girl with her fingers pressed to the edges of the world, trying to keep it from crumbling.

She’s a thousand heartbreaks in one. She’s the night you stay up too late and every hour feels like a wound. She’s the cigarette you don’t finish, the voicemail you don’t delete.

I know her at 16, staring at her reflection, trying to scrape something real out of the blur. And at 18, standing at the edge of her future with fists full of past selves, wondering which ones to keep, which ones to let go.

She is every version of a mistake. Every version of a girl who thought she was too much, too little, not enough. She is the paper cut you don’t notice until it stings.

I know her, and I love her like an apology. Like a grief so big it has to become something else. She’s not here anymore, but she’s everywhere I look. She’s every shadow and every shard, every broken piece of a mirror that never quite showed her face the way she hoped it would.

And still, she’s the only one who’s ever understood me.