Not a Record, But a Conversation

By Kayden

Memory is not a library. It is not composed of neat rows of ordered moments, not drawers we open to uncover the truth. It is a house that remodels itself each time we walk through the door. Walls move, windows shift and sometimes the staircase that leads to nowhere.

You remember things you never lived, and forget moments you swore you couldn’t have. A smell can tear up the floorboards. A single word can repaint an entire room. Is it deception, or design?

There are places in you built from fragments: the weight of a hand you hadn’t felt in years, the pale light of a morning that may never have existed, the echo of a laughter you can’t place. And yet they persist. These memories do not ask for accuracy. They ask only to be felt.

And yet, for all its shifting nature, memory anchors you. It tells you you have been. That you have felt. Even when you question who you are now, you cannot deny who you once were. After all, the past is never still. It breathes. It rearranges. It chooses its moments to surface, uninvited, with sharp edges or soft hands. And you, reluctant curator, decide again what to keep, what to bury and what to reinvent.

Maybe that is the truth of memory. Not a record, but a conversation. An unfinished story. A mirror that remembers more than it reflects.

By Kayden