When the Hands Are Empty, the Heart Still Holds

What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

If I could carry only one thing with me, it wouldn’t be something I could pack or wear or place neatly on a shelf.

It would be my memories—the moments that cling to me for reasons I can’t always explain. Some I’ve chosen to hold close: the nights when my teenage girls ambush us in our king bed, talking late into the night and calling it “family bonding time” because our youngest insists the bed is too big; the taste of a ripe mango on a sweltering, rain-soaked afternoon; the tang of pineapple on my tongue the very first time I tried it—my lips tingling and swelling from an allergy I didn’t yet know I had, but still I kept eating because it was that good; and the crisp sweetness of biting into an apple still warm from the sun, just plucked from the branch. These are some of the treasures I press like flowers between the pages of my days, carefully preserved so I can return to them whenever I need their light.

But others… they chose me. They are the uninvited guests that took up residence in my mind. The quiet grief of goodbyes I never wanted to say. The feel of a doorknob that no longer belongs to my home. A song that still tightens in my chest, decades later.

The truth is, we don’t always get to decide what stays. Some memories are deliberate keepsakes. Others are burrs, hitchhiking through the years without our consent. Yet both kinds shape the story we carry.

Over time, they become more than recollections. They are proof. Proof that I have lived here on this earth, that I have loved enough to ache, that I have been moved enough to remember. Proof that my life is stitched together from countless threads—some silky and bright, others rough and knotted—but all part of the same tapestry.

And when all else is gone, the moments will remain—the proof that I was here.

– The Wallflower