Have I Told You This Already?: Stories I Don't Want to Forget to Remember

by Lauren Graham

Sometimes we polish an experience to make facts line up more closely with feelings or exaggerate moments to make a better dinner party tale. And sometimes, mercifully, details become blurry over time, maybe because the sharp reality is too painful to carry.

There was solace in spending time with people I’d missed, but an ache over the circumstances that created that space.

“Someday, this will all be a memory.”

“Someday” doesn’t like to tell you when it plans to arrive.

Sometimes, mercifully, without our even asking it to, memory holds hands with fact and helps dull its edges during times when reality is too overwhelming to fully take in a joyous moment, like the birth of a child, or in a darker one, when pain is too great to comprehend, like the loss of a loved one.

“It was almost like she didn’t really want to know me,” I said. “She probably didn’t,”

“But that’s a character, not a person. It’s not the whole picture.”

I don’t want to see behind the curtain. Illusion is part of what I like in what I see or read.

It’s very useful to always have a friend who is much older and one who is much younger. The older friend will remind you what there is to look forward to and the younger friend will keep you telling your stories over again so you’ll remember not to forget them. An older friend will tell you you have plenty of time yet, and a younger friend will make you forget time altogether because when you’re with them you’ll feel, even for a moment, that you’re the exact same age.

The best defense, I’ve learned, is to be conscious of the only thing I can control: what it is I’m doing in the space between my ears.

You spend so much of your early life looking up to people older than you and figuring they know things you’ll someday know too,

Death versus maintaining youthful beauty should not be a competition.

Do I need to be good at more things or simply find more enjoyment in what I’m already pretty good at?

When life gives you lemons, you can make lemonade, but you don’t have to.