How our pasts visit us uninvited, and why we sometimes need to let them stay awhile.
Memory doesn’t knock.
It just lets itself in.
It shows up at strange hours—while brushing your teeth, slicing fruit, reaching for the mug with the chipped rim. Sometimes it’s kind, like the smell of rain on concrete. Sometimes it’s a gut punch wrapped in a lullaby.
I used to think memory was something to manage. Keep the good ones, erase the bad ones, file them all away into something neat and narratable. But that’s not how it works. Memory is a shapeshifter. What once healed can later hurt. What once broke you might someday save you.
I wrote What Still Lingers during a season where memory kept rising like steam—quiet, invisible, and everywhere. I wasn’t chasing the past. It was chasing me. And at some point, I stopped running from it and started taking notes.
“Some memories stay not because they want to hurt you, but because they’re waiting to be understood.”
There’s medicine in remembering.
But there’s haunting, too.
Both can be sacred.
We don’t always get to choose what sticks.
But we do get to choose what we do with it when it arrives.
Let it sit. Let it speak. Let it leave when it’s ready.
Some memories aren’t meant to be rewritten. Just witnessed.
