Think about the people missing from your life, and how you feel about them. What we remember — and what we forget — may reveal more about ourselves than about them. We have photos, letters, souvenirs, and fragments of memory, but our powerful imagination takes over from there: We color in the blanks. And that’s OK. Retouching old loves is a way of understanding what we want. It helps us find our way to new ones.

It’s impossible to know whether the experiences below are about infatuation, true love, lust, or something else entirely. But we can be sure that each of these contributors learned about life and themselves in the process.