Remember this.

I am a gatherer and a rememberer.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

Notes, journals, calendars, essays, notebooks. I have stories started and stopped, dates and memories saved, ideas and moments scribbled on scrap paper.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

So I can tell you one year ago today, it was picture day at my girls’ school. Ellie wore a teal dress and Harper’s blonde hair was long and parted on the right side. Ellie had archery practice after school and had taken extra clothes to change into.

I started my work day with an email stating my school was closing and, then in the afternoon, I saw two cars fly through the air as they careened into the land that used to hold my grandpa’s gardens.

I picked up Ellie from archery practice at 5:00, put some frozen chicken nuggets in the oven, and told Harper to get ready for soccer practice that started at 6:00.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

By 5:15, I knew something was wrong with Chris, I felt compelled to load the kids up and go to the movie theater he said he was in.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

A year later, I still don’t know what made me go that evening. We had been separated a month, Chris was struggling, and I was focused on keeping the kids safe. I will say the push I felt to find him was of God and not of me. I could feel the chaos slowly creeping in as I made my way from our house into the city, but I couldn’t stop what was in motion.

I look back at the few years and still can’t believe the things that have happened.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

I took a picture of Chris that night in the Burger King parking lot as he talked with a police officer who was going over his options with him: jail or rehab.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

I knew something was shifting in that moment, something big that we couldn’t come back from. We were either done or we were beginning again. At the time, I would have told you this was the final collapse in a long line of tiny pieces being chipped off our marriage.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

I wanted to remember what the final blow felt like so I took a picture.

I am a gatherer and a rememberer.

I don’t gather to write the stories later, at least not consciously. But my brain, without my prompting, starts weaving together ideas and images and words. I’m not even aware it’s happening, that a story is being told inside of me.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

Whether it ever makes its way to the public or not, I am collecting information and threads to help myself understand the world and the people around me. I want truth and realness and clear eyes even if the lessons go no farther than my own heart. I know it would seem to be the opposite, but some of my best, hardest, most prized stories haven’t been shared here,
can’t be shared here,
won’t be shared here.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

I write because this is the one year anniversary of dragging Chris to a detox facility and the beginning of his journey to sobriety, but I write more to say remember, remember this. It is not always good. It is not always easy. It is not always joy.

But I can remember it nonetheless.

Last week, Harper sat on the couch writing in her binder. She plays school often and was making notes on her students with a pink highlighter, her facial expressions working overtime to keep up with her furious note-taking.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

Everything isn’t momentous and breath-taking, sometimes it’s just quiet and ordinary, but I need to stay present and awake for it. Other times, it’s heart-stopping and so life-shifting you can’t help but to burn it in your memory.

A few weeks ago, Chris ended up back at the same Burger King from a year ago. In a new work truck, in a new state of mind, in a new season, in the exact same parking spot from his last visit.

I asked him if it was hard or felt weird. There have been times, almost unexpectedly, when you get pushed back to a moment you’d soon forget and it takes concentrated effort to climb out of it again.

It felt fine, he said.

It didn’t feel bad or hurt, it just felt like a lunch stop during a work day.

Remember this.
Remember this, I whisper to myself.

Time can help or hurt our memories; we get to decide. We can collect the painful parts and set them on our shoulder, look at them often and pick off the scabs they left so we never truly heal. Or we can gather them in our hands, view them from a million angles and with a million different sets of eyes, and then place them back down so they can’t hurt us anymore.

We still carry them, but we get to choose how we wear them.

I am a gatherer and a rememberer.

I don’t know if it’s just how I’m made or something influenced this. I will write it down, take a picture of it, jot down the weather or the feeling. I will rehash it in my mind, give it all the power and attention, and then slowly dismantle the memory so it doesn’t hurt me anymore.

Chris and I went on a date night a few weeks ago. Sushi, Barnes and Noble, and a movie. It’s predictable but comfortable. And it’s what we like: food, books, movies. We don’t have to impress anyone, we just have to be together.

Barnes and Noble’s parking lot butts up against Burger King’s parking lot. I stared at it as we walked back to the car. I wondered if the glass shards were still in their landscaping, if I should go and clean up the mess we made last year. I wondered if workers remembered us, if the security cameras saw our chaos.

And then I got in the car with my husband, clean and sober and quiet, and we drove away from the memory.

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