A Record
On the small things no one else saw, and the versions of a life that keep returning.
STILL JUNE · ESSAY № 22 · MAY 2026 · 7 MINI’ve spent my life collecting things that no one saw.
Small things.
The feeling in my stomach when I walked out of the front door of my Jacksonville home for the last time.
The silence in the delivery room before Nash cried.
The sting of embarrassment that hit just before the pain when the pavement of my college campus came up to meet me.
The sound of my brother laughing somewhere high up in the trees.
The afternoon I sat outside in the Florida heat with a paperback in my lap and felt a fear I’d carried since childhood loosen its grip for the first time.
None of these moments would mean much to anyone else.
Most of them don’t even make sense without several pages of context.
But they’ve followed me.
For years, I thought I was trying to understand them.
Now I think I was just trying not to lose them.
The older I get, the stranger memory feels.
A house can disappear.
A marriage can end.
A church can become unrecognizable.
A person can leave.
A decade can pass.
And somehow your body still remembers exactly how it felt to stand in that doorway.
How the sunlight filled the kitchen while you stirred something on the stove.
The sound a screen door made when it closed behind you.
The smell of a hospital room.
The weight of a paperback resting open across your knees.
The older I get, the more fascinated I become by how many versions of the same life can exist at once.
The version I remember.
The version someone else remembers.
The version we tell ourselves when we’re twenty-three.
The version we tell ourselves at thirty-two.
The version we tell to survive.
I used to spend a lot of energy trying to close the distance between those versions.
Trying to explain myself.
Trying to make sure people understood what I meant, what happened, who I was.
Throwing pieces of myself into the wind.
It never made me feel more understood.
It only made the loneliness louder.
At some point, I stopped explaining.
Not all at once.
Gradually.
The way things shift when they have to.
I stopped trying to understand it, too.
I still don’t understand most of it.
I’ve made peace with that.
And the quiet I’d been filling with explanation started filling with something else.
It was bringing me back.
Back to the girl standing in the driveway.
Back to the woman sitting in the delivery room.
Back to the sister listening for a laugh.
Not to fix anything.
Not to make sense of it.
Just to sit beside her for a minute.
A few nights ago I found myself walking down the hallway toward my son’s room after everyone else had gone to bed.
The house was quiet.
The kind of quiet that makes every movement feel louder than it is.
I walked over to his bed and put my hand on his chest.
Just for a second.
Long enough to feel it rise.
Long enough to feel it fall.
Then I kissed his forehead and went back to bed.
I don’t know why some moments stay.
Why the memory of one silence still wakes me faster than any noise.
I don’t know why certain memories follow us while others disappear completely.
I don’t know why the things that make us feel the most alone are so often the very things that connect us to each other.
I just know that every time I’ve told the truth about one of those moments, someone has quietly answered back.
Me too.
STILL JUNE · ESSAY № 22 · FILED FROM CHARLOTTE, NC