I'll admit it: I'm a sucker for stories without discrete endings—tales of lost loves, notes written into the ether, missed connections and stories of profound relationships that dissolved for reasons beyond one's control.

Pictory Magazine's newest project, The One Who Got Away, collects photographs and anecdotes about lost friends and loves from contributors around the globe. Magazine editor, Laura Brunow Miner created Pictory as a way for people to share the stories that accompany their photographs. For each issue, Miner selects an editorial theme, ranging from the conceptual (danger) to the much more specific (Portrait of London), then accepts submissions of captioned photographs. At any given time, several themes are open for entries, then 20-40 images and captions are published as collaborative picture stories.

In the introduction to The One Who Got Away, Miner writes:

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.

See Pictory's theme page for topics currently open for submission, and make sure to take the time to read through the captions of The One Who Got Away; they'll tug on your heartstrings.