I have a bad habit of keeping things. Not useful things. Not valuable things. Just things that meant something once.

A receipt from a Tuesday grocery shop. A train ticket. A bracelet I’ve worn until it breaks. My journal is less a collection of thoughts than an archaeological site of small proofs that I was somewhere, or with someone, once.

I have never been very good at letting go. Not of objects, moments, places, or people. And yet I am constantly distancing myself from all of them.

Travelling is essentially one long lesson in impermanence. You arrive somewhere, and before you’ve even learnt how to pronounce the name properly you’ve fallen in love, and then just as quickly you’re leaving.

The sea understands this better than most. A wave appears on the horizon, gathers itself into something beautiful, carries you for a few seconds, then breaks and disappears back into the ocean. You paddle after it anyway. There is something cruel about watching a good wave disappear. You can see exactly what it could have been while it is happening, which is perhaps why surfers spend so much time chasing them. Surfers, after all, have made a hobby out of chasing things that are already moving away from us.

Travelling feels much the same. People wash in and out of your life with the same casual inevitability. Someone can be beside you for a night, long enough to share a meal, a cigarette, a bed, a wave, a secret, and then suddenly they’re a photograph in your camera roll.

So, without the luxury of carrying every physical thing with me, I’ve found myself holding onto other things instead. Conversations. Photos. Voice notes.

As a girl whose relationships with some of the people she loves most exists almost entirely through a screen, I have developed a slightly unhealthy reverence for text messages. My phone contains some of the most important conversations of my life: my friends celebrating graduations, their first corporate jobs, breakfast recipes, gossiping, declarations of love, having minor emotional catastrophes from countries away.

Text is the red string connecting me to people I cannot physically reach. It has weight. To me, a conversation over text can carry almost the same emotional significance as sitting across from someone at a table.

Which is perhaps why, when someone you’ve never even met manages to become part of that little digital world, their disappearance can feel strangely like something has been taken from you.

Which brings me to the fact that I got ghosted for the first time about a week ago.

The ridiculous thing is that I found myself wanting to preserve it. The same instinct I had as a child with my old clothes. The same instinct that makes me keep receipts from insignificant supermarket visits. I reread things. Remembered the days I thought we’d have. Held onto small details. Tried to make a little museum out of something that had barely had time to become an object.

Because somewhere in my sentimental little brain, keeping the evidence felt like keeping the thing itself. And if I’m honest, I think that is what I am really afraid of.

That if I don’t have evidence, it didn’t really happen. That if I cannot point to a photograph, a receipt, a message, a bracelet, then perhaps the thing didn’t weigh anything at all.

But a wave doesn’t become meaningless because it breaks.

You don’t need to collect the water in a jar to prove you were in it.

It’s not about what you can collect, what you can keep, that gives these places or people weight or importance. I don’t need to stop being sentimental. That would be like asking the sea to stop moving.  I just have to trust that whatever I find meaning in has meaning. I don’t need to prove it. I can let the waves go. I can watch them come towards me, feel the excitement of their arrival, let them carry me for as long as they do, and then watch them disappear back into the ocean. I had that wave and there will be another one, there is always another one.

But then again, I have just spent a few hundred words turning a man who ghosted me into a small emotional epic, carefully inflating the incident until it felt large enough to justify feeling about. Perhaps this is simply another form of my sentimental hoarding: if I turn it into a story, then at least I get to keep it.

In this case, we didn’t make it to Plaza San Martín. We never got the chance to stop somewhere along the way and grab something sweet. There was no receipt to fold into my pocket and carry around until the ink faded. Nothing physical to carry around the world as proof that, for a brief moment, something happened.

So, this is my receipt.