I Remember It Differently

I Remember It Differently

I remember it was raining that night. Not a gentle drizzle, but a downpour — fat drops clinging to my skin, the streetlights blurry halos through my windshield. I remember pulling up in front of the old café on 3rd Street, our place, the one with the chipped blue awning and coffee that always tasted burnt.

But you say it wasn’t raining.

You say it was a crisp autumn evening, leaves skittering across the pavement, and that I was late. You remember me rushing in, cheeks flushed, wind tangled in my hair, the scent of woodsmoke hanging in the air.

We both remember the fight, though. The words sharp and tumbling over each other, a terrible avalanche of things we didn’t mean to say but couldn’t stop ourselves from hurling. I remember your hands trembling as you reached for your coffee cup. You remember mine clenched into fists beneath the table.

Funny how memory works.

I’ve read that our brains don’t record memories like a video camera, capturing events exactly as they happened. Instead, we build stories from scraps — a sound, a color, a smell — and stitch them together with the threads of how we felt at the time. And every time we remember, we rewrite it, whether we realize it or not.

That night, in my memory, you accused me of giving up too easily. Of never fighting for us. I remember the sting of those words, how they cracked something in my chest. But you insist you never said that. You say you told me you were scared, that you didn’t know how to fix the thing unraveling between us.

Maybe you did.

Maybe I wasn’t listening.

I remember leaving first, the bell over the café door chiming as I stepped into the storm. The rain blurred my vision, but I knew it wasn’t just the weather. You remember being the one to walk away, your shoulders squared, refusing to look back, even though every step felt like walking barefoot over glass.

It’s strange, the small details we cling to. You swear I wore that old denim jacket with the missing button, but I could have sworn it was my green coat with the frayed cuffs. You say the song playing over the speakers was “Landslide”, while I hear “Wish You Were Here” every time I close my eyes and relive it.

Maybe both are true. Maybe neither.

We haven’t spoken about it in years. Life has a way of pulling people in opposite directions. I got a new job, moved cities, fell in and out of love. You traveled, sent the occasional postcard, signed only with your initials. The threads of our story frayed, unraveling slowly until all that remained were these scattered memories, and the quiet question of what might’ve happened if one of us had stayed a little longer at that table.

A few months ago, we bumped into each other at a mutual friend’s wedding. I recognized you by your laugh before I even turned around. For a moment, we were those same two people again, caught in a memory neither of us fully agreed on.

We danced, made small talk about work, families, the ridiculousness of wedding favors shaped like tiny mason jars. But beneath it all, I felt it — the weight of all the things we remembered differently.

I almost asked you then.

“Did it matter who left first?”

“Who said what?”

“Which song played?”

But I didn’t.

Because maybe the truth isn’t in the facts. Maybe it’s in the way we carried those memories, the way they shaped the people we became after.

You told me that night at the wedding that you always thought I hated rain. I laughed because I remembered you loving storms, claiming they made you feel alive. You looked surprised, said you always thought you complained about wet shoes and ruined plans.

See? Memory is a liar. Or maybe it’s a poet, softening the sharp edges, rearranging the verses.

I don’t know which version of that night is the real one anymore. I don’t know if it matters. What I know is that we each walked away carrying a different story, one stitched together by love, resentment, youth, and all the words left unsaid.

And maybe, in the end, that’s the most honest thing of all.

We never really remember the past.

We remember the way it made us feel.

And I remember it differently.