The Stories I Forget

(Or, The Ones I'll Never Know)

I went back to where I grew up last weekend. I don’t do that often. I appreciate my hometown now, but returning always stirs ghosts.

It’s too easy to slip into the person I once was, or who people remember me as. It makes me feel rotten, like I wasted all that potential.
Maybe that’s true.
Maybe I just feel too much.
Maybe that’s what being human is.

This past weekend, though, I went because my ride-or-die Emily was visiting her parents, fresh off a trip from New Orleans to Boston for my Cancer Sharks event.

Emily and I grew up in rural southern New Hampshire. It’s the kind of place where people still remember where they sat in first grade and the name of the kid who threw up on the bus in 1997. The town is so small that decades later, anyone who attended the regional high school between 1996 and 2001, the year my sister graduated, is still filed somewhere in my ever-questionable memory.

(True story: a friend of mine was recently having her computer fixed across the state, mentioned my name in passing, and the tech said, “Oh yeah, I know her. We were on the swim team together.” That’s small-town living. You never really leave. You just get further down the road.)

Last weekend was the Monadnock Art Walk, a multi-town event where local artists open their galleries and show their work. I was flipping through the brochure at Emily’s parents’ house when one name caught my eye. It tugged at something in the back of my mind, though I couldn’t place why.

Emily’s mom called out from the kitchen, “You went to school with him. Probably a few years behind.”

So off we went.

The second I stepped into the gallery, the fog lifted. I recognized him and his wife. They looked at us with that same I know you, but I can’t quite place you half-smile people give when they’re trying to remember a face from decades ago. I reintroduced myself, and everything clicked. Names, memories, track team.

Then he told me a story I’d never heard before.
Or rather, a story I’d been in but still have no memory of.

It started with, “I had such a crush on you,” which was definitely news to me, and took off from there. A high-school basketball game. A borrowed Mustang. A dirt driveway.

He explained how nervous he had been, how proud he felt driving his dad’s car, and how completely mortified he was when that Mustang got stuck in my parents’ driveway.
Like, truly stuck.
Which tracks, because that drive is notorious.
He said I had to go inside and wake my stepdad to help push the car out.
And I did.
And he left mortified.

That, he said, was one of his most embarrassing moments of high school.

And me?
I have absolutely no memory of it.

Not a flicker. Not a vague image. Nothing. The story might as well have belonged to someone else entirely. I even called my stepdad the next day to ask if he remembered. He didn’t.

And yet, this artist, who until that moment was just another name from a long-ago yearbook, has carried this memory for decades. It became a tiny, enduring part of his personal mythology. For him, it was unforgettable.
For me, it didn’t exist.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that. About how two people can share the same moment and walk away with completely different versions of it. Or, in my case, with no version at all.

I think I’ve misunderstood perspective. I’ve treated it like an opinion, but it really feels more like the architect of my memories. It decides what to build into the story and what to make vanish. It shapes how I remember myself and others, which is unsettling, because it means the truth of my life might exist in versions I’ll never see.

I can still feel the sting of things other people have long forgotten. Words I obsessed over for years that they don’t even remember saying. Or worse, words they remember hearing from me.

Maybe none of it is that deep. Maybe moments are just moments, and the ones meant for me, for the artist, and for whoever else was there, are the ones that stick.
And the rest, so many of them, simply don’t.

It’s humbling and a little haunting to realize I’m walking through stories I’ll never know about. I’m a character in memories I can’t even recognize. Someone I barely remember might still be carrying the weight of something I said or did long before I became who I am today.

My memories are unreliable narrators. They exaggerate, they edit, they misplace whole pages.
And maybe that’s okay.
Maybe it’s even beautiful.
Because it means my life isn’t only measured in my stories. It’s threaded through a much larger collection I’ll never fully know.

I was just a girl who needed a ride home.
But to someone else, I was a chapter.
Maybe even a good yarn.
And there’s something sacred in that.

Legit, the view from a few steps away from where I grew up. I never appreciated it then. Kids can be dumb.