Memory doesn’t return all at once. It comes back in pieces you can ignore.A moment that lingers longer than it should. Reactions that don’t match the room you’re in.
A feeling you can’t quite place.You move past it, tell yourself you’re tired, distracted or overthinking.And for a while, that works. You move, stay focused and keep everything where it belongs.But then you notice something has shifted.Just enough that you start noticing it.That’s the part that unsettles you. Not the memory itself but the fact that it didn’t stay where you put it.There’s a kind of control in deciding what you carry forward.What you remember and what you don’t.What you allow to matter.But memory doesn’t always follow those rules.Sometimes it waits.And then it returns when you are least prepared to make sense of it.