We remember not what happened, but what stayed.
Only fragments of the past remain within reach. The rest slips away, settling into an unmarked reliquary beneath consciousness, where forgetting is less an erasure than a quiet form of shelter. What we carry forward is never the whole—it is what survived our leaving.
Because of this, memory does not return the past as it was. It returns it as reflection.
What meets us, then, is not a faithful portrait but a warped image—perception bent by distance and desire, like a moon swollen to fill the sky. A concave surface, curved inward like the inside of a spoon, pulls objects too close to be understood. Magnified, they loom larger than life, sometimes flipping entirely, depending on how near we stand.
A convex surface does the opposite. It pushes the world away, shrinking its subjects into faint silhouettes—distant, diminished, and yet strangely expansive in their distortion. Other mirrors, the carnival kind, stretch and compress the familiar until recognition falters altogether. They do not conceal reality; they rearrange it.
Memory behaves in the same way.
What we reconstruct is not truth, but a theater of refraction—a performance staged by imagination and mistaken for certainty. The story we remember is never the one we lived. It is a version polished by time, bent by repetition, altered by the angle from which we now approach it.
Emotion provides the surface on which this distortion occurs. Memory does not rest in neutral glass; it settles on feeling. What returns to us is therefore not sequence, but intensity—not what happened, but how it pressed itself into us. Recollection arrives blurred, garbled, incomplete, shaped less by accuracy than by need.
This is why remembering feels both intimate and unreliable. What we keep is not an archive but a set of impressions—images thinned by loss, brightened by longing, stitched together to preserve continuity rather than truth. We do not remember in order to know; we remember in order to remain.
This piece is part of a two-part meditation on memory, reflection, and what cannot be fully known.
→ Continue to What Remains (Part II)
Author’s note:
This meditation unfolds in two movements. Not Knowing attends to the limits of memory and perception; What Remains turns toward what those limits leave behind. The second piece follows quietly from the first.
Note:
Reliquary: Pronunciation (re-lə-ˌkwer-ē) A container or shrine in which sacred relics are kept.