Darnell Lamont Walker > Quotes > Quote > Darnell Lamont shared it

“That’s not how I remember it” is one of the most intimate sentences we can offer each other because it doesn’t argue so much as it exposes, quietly, almost awkwardly, the fact that memory is not a record but a private weather system, shaped by fear, love, shame, desire, by what we needed in order to survive the moment being recalled, and to say it is to step forward without armor and admit that your version of events lives inside your body, not in facts, that it arrives with its own smells and silences and omissions, that it may be inconvenient or unflattering or unbearably tender, and that you are willing to risk the loneliness of being misunderstood for the chance of being seen, because beneath the sentence is a deeper request: don’t correct me yet, don’t reduce this to accuracy, just sit with the knowledge that I was there too, that I felt something you did not, or felt it differently, and that the distance between our memories is not a failure of love but one of its most honest conditions.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker