What the Present Needs

I used to think
memory was how we preserve truth.

That the past stays intact somewhere inside us,
like an archive.

Distorted, maybe,
but fundamentally faithful.

So I trusted my own recollections
the way people trust photographs.

But the more I paid attention,
the more unstable it all became.

Not because I was forgetting,

but because I was noticing
how quickly experience turns into interpretation.

The same event
splits into multiple versions
depending on who I am
when I remember it.

What I needed from the memory
decides what it contains.

And over time,
I stopped asking
what actually happened.

Because “what happened”
never arrives without negotiation.

Even now, when I think I am recalling,
I am really selecting.

And I began to suspect
this is not a flaw in memory,

but its entire purpose.

We don’t remember to preserve the past.

We remember to keep the present
intact enough
to continue living inside it.