The Memory Keeper

(For the sake of privacy, all names of people I talk about have been changed)

I was nervously chewing multiple Life Saver mints she had handed me, their sweetness was dissolving too quickly under the pressure of my anxious jaw. My hands were fidgeting in my lap, my stomach was tight with that familiar unease of wanting to belong too much, of wanting to be cherished but fearing that my presence could somehow be too much. Sometimes it is, even for my step kids…. I’ve felt more and more lately how “too much” yet not enough I have been the last 29 years … The car speakers played a sentimental Jonas Brothers song, one of those melodies that sound like they melted together with summer skies and rose-tinted flashbacks. We were on our way to the concert, and even before we arrived, I was already living inside the memory of it all.

I don’t think she noticed the way my eyes built up tears as I stared out the window. I had a visualization… some call it a vision, I’m more careful with that word… of us at sixty years old, still driving together to concerts, still laughing in cars, still orbiting each other’s lives as constants rather than passing characters. I imagined wrinkles on our faces and soft, familiar jokes between us. I teared up at the thought, caught in the fragile beauty of a friendship that could, if carefully tended, last a lifetime. And then I silenced myself before I could speak it aloud. I thought she would find me strange if I admitted that the thought of decades of closeness had moved me to tears before the night had even begun.

It’s tragic being a poet and photographer feeling so much yet keeping most of it to myself.

We arrived at the concert, my heart (and I’d like to believe hers as well) was beating with anticipation, the lights of the stage was bathing us in shared excitement. Music has a way of binding people, of creating a pocket of eternity where the noise of ordinary life can’t intrude. As the songs swelled around us, I felt a rare kind of joy…  the kind that insists you might actually belong, that you might actually be loved.

Reed and a friend of his showed up.

At one point, in the swell of music and flashing lights, I leaned over to her and confessed that I wanted to become so close to her that we would end up like sisters. It wasn’t casual … it was the kind of thing I had been holding in for months, a hope that clung to me like ivy. She smiled but then said something that unsettled me… that I would probably end up closer to her sister than to her. She mentioned that her sister was nearly my age. I laughed politely, but inside I felt a pang. Why did she imagine me slipping away into someone else’s orbit? We are in the same city… Why was the idea of our closeness, of sisterhood between us, so easily rerouted into a hypothetical? I tried to brush it off, but it clung to me, a quiet reminder that sometimes the people we want most don’t envision us in the same place in their future as we do.

Not to sound romantic or anything, but platonic relationships are just as important…. I still get butterflies and nervous when dealing with new close friendships. Not just with my husband (even still).

Still, I forced myself back into the moment. I am so used to fixating on the tragic, unstoppable endings of things … the slow drifting apart, the silent betrayals from others, the sudden dissolutions … that I often miss the euphoria right in front of me. That night, I tried to stay with the music, with her laughter, with the flashes of connection that felt like sunlight breaking through storm clouds.

Then came the part that hurts. The night wound down, and I found myself watching her with Reed. Reed wasn’t her husband. He was the man she had found companionship with during her separation. I never judged her for that. After the nearly 2 years of cruelty and abuse she had endured, after the exhaustion of trying to keep a broken marriage stitched together, I was glad she had found a pocket of warmth. Reed  seemed to bring out her laughter, the side of her that was too often buried under obligation and pain.

I took out my phone and recorded a video of the two of them. To anyone else, maybe it looked trivial, but for me it was sacred. I wanted to capture the glow in her face, the way joy had returned to her body. I wanted to bottle that moment not just for myself but for her, for the version of her thirty years from now who might look back and say, “That was when I was alive and so young.” I even imagined a future where she left her husband and married Reed, where they built something lasting together. I thought of showing her a compilation video decades down the road, of her crying sentimental tears because I had preserved these fragments of her joy.

Not to sound overly stuck on my own view of it… but…

That was my intention. Always nostalgia. Always memory-keeping. Always trying to grasp at something ephemeral so it wouldn’t slip into nothing.

But she saw me recording.

Her face changed, sharp with disapproval, and I knew immediately she had misread me. She thought my recording was intrusive, even cruel, as if I were cataloguing something forbidden. Thinking I would intentionally use it against her… she had paranoia for something she obviously felt a bit of guilt over… She told me as much … let me know for a good couple of minutes how she saw it, how wrong it was. I apologized quickly, sincerely, a couple times… but she wouldn’t let it go. My chest tightened with shame. I wanted to explain that my intentions were innocent, that they were soaked in sentiment rather than malice. But words tangled in my throat. I couldn’t convince her of the purity of my intentions or my heart. In that moment I was seen as evil and it felt strongly like there was no going back.

So I left. I left the concert halfway through, walking out with regret pressing down on me like a heavy coat. I had opened myself up, revealed my natural sentimental side, only for it to be seen as a threat. Something beautiful in me had been mistaken for something dangerous. I wanted to cry, not because of her anger, but because my desire to love and preserve was misunderstood once again.

I have always been the memory keeper. I have always carried around an invisible camera in my heart, capturing snapshots no one else notices. When I was a child in foster care, I would memorize the sound of doors closing, the smell of dinners I would never taste again, the lines of faces that only hovered briefly in my life. I was terrified that everything would slip away, and I knew it would, so I hooked myself to memories I knew instantly I didn’t want to let go of or forget… I was also  terrified that no one would remember me, that I would become untraceable. So I remembered for everyone. I recorded things… in my mind, in journals, eventually on my phones and ultimately in a blog… because permanence was my way of fighting erasure.

But the world often misreads memory keepers. People see a camera and assume exploitation… Those with PTSD, I get it, I too get it…. People hear sentiment and assume clinginess. They watch us tear up at a song and assume over-sensitivity rather than the depth of a heart desperate for belonging.

That night at the concert crystallized this tension in me… the ache of wanting to be seen as I am versus the reality of being misinterpreted. I wanted her to know that when I say I want us to be like sisters, I don’t mean to overwhelm her, I don’t mean to clutch her too tightly. I mean that I crave permanence. I mean that the world has been too fleeting for me, too full of abrupt goodbyes.

Her reaction hurt because it reminded me that not everyone values memory in the way I do. Not everyone wants to see themselves decades later, preserved in grainy footage. Some people want to live unrecorded, unremembered, free from the weight of nostalgia.

And yet, I can’t undo the part of me that saves things. I can’t stop myself from reaching for permanence in a world that loves to dissolve.

Leaving that concert early, guilt blooming in my chest, I realized something… I wasn’t just mourning her misinterpretation of my video. I was mourning the larger truth that I may never be understood in full. That my sentimentality, my tenderness, my hunger for preservation will always risk being misread… But maybe … just maybe … being misunderstood doesn’t cancel out the beauty of trying. Maybe the act of keeping memories is still sacred, even if no one else sees it. Maybe one day she will stumble across another moment I captured … one she does value… and feel no guilt for, herself… and understand that it was always love, never harm.

Until then, I will keep recording, keep writing, keep saving. Because if I don’t, who will?

And if I cannot do that, write, photograph, or record in some way the life I’ve lived and the people I’ve come across that I’ve felt a deep attachment to… my life feels empty and meaningless. I don’t want to leave with no proof of my existence and experience. No story to leave behind.