It Is Not I

I wonder if memory is a little unfair to the people we once knew.

It has a peculiar habit of keeping them exactly where we left them.

Somewhere in the mind, they remain leaning against an old doorway, laughing at something we can no longer remember. They still say the cute things they always said, keep the same darling, daily habits, and move through routines we once knew by heart. They still play their favorite song on repeat as they drive. Their ambitions are still ahead of them. So much of what will happen to them has not happened yet.

Years later, we can summon them this way and feel, with remarkable certainty, I know this person.

I used to think this was one of the loveliest things about friendship.

That the very best relationships were the ones in which months, even years, could pass, and when we found one another again, we could simply pick up where we left off.

I still find something lovely in that idea. It's the where we left off part I've begun to wonder about.

Not because affection cannot survive an absence. I think it often can. There are people for whom eternal fondness seems almost untouched by time.

But perhaps there is no exact where we left off to return to.

That place existed between two people who existed then.

The friendship may find its way back to us.  It may even become wonderfully enchanting again. But we cannot open to the old page as though all the intervening years were merely an intermission, as though neither person had read anything in the meantime.

Because while memory held them somewhere unclaimed by the earth's turning, life already began reaching for them.

It's rather relentless that way...life.

It put its hands on them.

And us.

There were books we had not yet opened. People we had not yet loved. Sorrows that had not yet loosened their threads through us. The world rearranged itself around us, and somewhere along the way, our understanding of it rearranged itself too. Things we once believed with certainty softened. Other things became more certain still.

Even choices once made with complete devotion may belong to a person who would, maybe, quite possibly, but who could really know, choose differently now.

We don’t have to disown who we were in order to acknowledge that time has not left us exactly as we were.

There is an old story attributed to St. Augustine that I keep returning to.

Years after leaving behind the life he had once lived, Augustine was recognized by a woman who had known him then. She called after him:

Augustine! Augustine! It is I.

And he answered:

Yes. But it is not I.

I love the strange little impossibility of that answer.

Because she wasn’t wrong.

She had recognized him perfectly.

The person she knew was real, but the years had not left him there.

Perhaps that is what memory sometimes fails to account for. It does not necessarily remember us incorrectly. It simply remembers a person who has continued living since then.

Perhaps stranger still is what happens when memory becomes certainty.

Someone knew us once, and from that old familiarity comes the confidence to speak to us and of us as though the intervening years have changed very little.

There is something almost startling about hearing yourself described with such conviction by someone who has not been present for all that came after.

Not because what they remember is different from what we remember.

Perhaps none of it is.

A past version of someone can be entirely genuine without being permanently definitive.

What they knew of us may have been true, and their understanding of us still incomplete.

But people are not photographs.

We are not preserved in anyone else’s memory of us.

We are living things.

And this isn’t only something that happens across long absences.

It can take place within the intimate spaces with those who currently sit closest to us.

There is such sweetness in knowing someone well. In knowing the old stories. In recognizing a mood before a word has been spoken. In remembering what someone loves and the endearing little things that have remained wonderfully unchanged.

I would never want to lose that.

Perhaps the answer is not pretending we are strangers, but allowing the person we love the dignity of surprising us.

To leave a little room around what we know.

I suppose this is why I find curiosity so romantic.

There is something lovely about being known for years and still being asked.

Not because someone hasn’t been paying attention.

Because they have.

They simply haven’t mistaken attention for completion.

A question does not announce, I have figured you out.

It says, There is still something about you I would like to understand.

And perhaps that is one of the great gifts of being loved well. To be deeply familiar to someone without being reduced to what is familiar.

To be known without being concluded.

There are questions we ask when we first meet someone.

And then there are questions we have to spend enough time together to ask.

Forever questions.

Questions born from yesterday’s answers.

Not because yesterday’s answers were insufficient. Simply because there has been another day of living since then.

Perhaps enduring love is not:

I know you better than anyone.

Perhaps it is something much humbler.

I knew you.

I know you.

And I am still asking.

There are, after all, some questions only time can answer.

And perhaps that is the poetry of it.

There is always more life to ask about.

One night at a time.

 

And read slowly,

Stephanie