The Version That Never Existed

“The Version That Never Existed” is about realizing you don't actually want someone back. You want to understand how the person you loved and the person you're seeing clearly now could possibly be the same person. I wrote this song about a very specific kind of grief. It's not, “I miss him and wish we were still together.” It's, “How did I love someone for so long and still not fully understand who I was loving?” After learning things that completely changed the way I saw him, I found myself replaying the entire relationship. Conversations. Promises. Moments I defended him. Things that didn't make sense at the time but suddenly looked completely different with the information I had now. I wasn't searching those memories because I wanted him back. I was searching for the moment I should've known.

The line, “I don't want you back. I want my trust back,” became the heart of this song because eventually I realized I wasn't grieving his absence as much as I was grieving what the experience had done to my ability to trust my own perception. I trusted what I was told. I believed the explanations. I believed the version of himself he showed me. And when that version fell apart, it didn't only change how I saw him. It made me question memories I had once felt completely certain about. What was real? When did things change? Was I missing something the entire time? How could the person I loved and the things I later learned belong to the same person?

That's why the lyric “Maybe that's the trauma talking, maybe that's the bond breaking slow” matters so much to me. Sometimes your mind can keep returning to someone not because you secretly want them back, but because it's still trying to reconcile two realities: the person you thought you knew and the behavior you can no longer explain away. That's a different kind of heartbreak. You're grieving the person, the relationship, and your understanding of what was real all at once.

For a while, I thought healing required me to figure it out. I wanted to separate every genuine moment from every lie. I wanted to know exactly when things changed. I wanted to determine which version of him was the “real” one. But maybe people aren't that easy to divide into two clean versions. Maybe I will never know exactly what he felt in every moment or which things were genuine. And maybe I don't need to. My understanding of him may have been incomplete, but my love was still real because I genuinely felt it. Trusting someone based on what they showed and told me doesn't mean there was something defective about my ability to trust.

That's where the final chorus begins to change: “Maybe that's the healing talking.” Healing might be accepting that some questions won't receive satisfying answers. I can grieve the version of him I loved without wanting the person I see now back. I can acknowledge that my memories mattered without needing every memory to mean what I originally thought it meant. And I can stop turning someone else's deception into evidence that there was something wrong with my ability to love, trust, or see the good in people. I don't want him back. I want my trust back. My trust in my perception. My trust in my ability to love without being foolish for it. My trust that learning something painful doesn't mean I have to question everything beautiful about myself that allowed me to love in the first place. And maybe that's the real ending of this song. I spent so long trying to figure out who he really was. Now I'm more interested in getting back to who I am.