Yesterday I discovered I couldn’t remember which of two films we’d watched first.

Not the first film we’d ever watched together. Just the first of two films we’d watched on that day.

It wasn’t even an especially important detail. If somebody else had forgotten it, I wouldn’t have thought twice. But there I was, staring into the middle distance trying to reconstruct the chronology of an entirely ordinary afternoon, and finding… nothing.

Now don’t worry, this isn’t the start of a film review. If it were, the twist would probably be wishing I could forget a terrible film.  My mind genuinely drew a blank when I was reminded we’d watched two films that day.

For a moment, I did what I’ve always done.

I started searching. Working backwards… It must have been before we’d gone out for snacks. What was knitting at the time? Was the TV screen still showing it, perhaps there was a reminder in the recently viewed, or was there still an advert for it? Looking for the contextual clues that might coax the memory back into view.

Then I simply said “I don’t remember.”

It felt oddly significant. There was a time when I wouldn’t have admitted that so easily. I’d have smiled, nodded, quietly pieced the answer together later, and pretended I’d known all along, and try to move the conversation on. Not because the film mattered…

Because memory is a strange thing to never quite have confidence in.

Or perhaps more accurately, it’s a strange thing to be taught not to have confidence in.

To remember tiny, inconsequential details with startling clarity while quietly wondering whether you’ve somehow misremembered everything important.

To know exactly where a conversation happened, what somebody was wearing, the song that was playing in the café… and still hesitate before trusting yourself.

Because if you’ve spent long enough being told:

“That isn’t what happened.” “You’re remembering it wrong.” “You’re too sensitive.” “That’s not what I meant.”

Eventually you stop questioning individual memories. You start questioning the person remembering them. So when I couldn’t remember which film came first, the questions weren’t really about films.

It was: “Can I trust my own mind?” 

A few hours later I picked up the scarf I’m knitting. Without thinking, I found myself looking at a section about halfway through and smiling. That bit was where they make Hoshi the admiral and then go off to rescue Hera. Not approximately. Exactly.

“These are the rows you were knitting while rewatching the last three episodes of Battlestar Galactica.”

Apparently my brain had decided that the emotional climax of a twenty-year-old science fiction series belonged permanently inside one repeat of skull and cup colourwork. Which is, objectively, a ridiculous filing system. And yet… I didn’t have to search for that memory. It simply arrived.

I remember reading something once about how we don’t store memories exclusively inside our heads. We distribute them. Photographs. Playlists. Fridge magnets. Concert tickets. The mug you bought on holiday.

They’re not really souvenirs. For some of us, they’re retrieval systems. The object isn’t the memory. It’s the address. I wonder if knitting does something similar for me.

Rows become evenings. Colours become conversations. A mistake three repeats back becomes the podcast I was listening to while I fixed it. Projects quietly absorb the atmosphere they were made in until they stop being just yarn and become timelines.

Maybe that’s true of more things than I realise. Perhaps the coffee mug doesn’t just remember the café. It remembers the conversation. The ticket stub doesn’t remember the concert. It remembers who I was standing beside. The book on the shelf remembers where I was living when I first read it.

Sometimes I find that comforting. Sometimes, if I’m honest, it terrifies me. Because every now and then I lose access to something I thought I should remember easily, and my mind immediately jumps several decades into the future.

What if this is how it starts? 

What if one day I lose the special things? Not facts. Not trivia. The feeling of them. The texture of a day. The shape of someone’s laugh. It’s a vicious combination.

To have been taught to doubt your own version of events. To then discover your memory isn’t always as accessible as you’d like. And still find yourself remembering things that nobody else would ever think to notice.  The inconsistency is what makes it so difficult. If my memory were uniformly bad, I’d know where I stood. Instead, it remembers with astonishing precision one moment, and leaves me staring at a blank space the next.

Therapy quietly introduced me to a phrase that keeps turning up in unexpected places.

Old Data.

The stories my brain tells aren’t always wrong. Sometimes they’re simply based on evidence collected by an older version of me. I wonder if memory works like that too. Perhaps I’ve spent years assuming that if I can’t retrieve something immediately, then it’s gone. Or worse. That if I say, “I don’t remember,” what I’m really admitting is, “You probably shouldn’t trust me.” But perhaps those aren’t the same thing. Perhaps there’s a difference between not remembering… and not being trustworthy.

Admitting I couldn’t remember which film we’d watched first turned out not to be a terrible thing. It was met with laughter, and a chorus of increasingly ridiculous quotes from the film.

For a moment I even caught myself asking, “Did we actually watch that today?” Trying to work out whether I was looking at real data or old data. We had. I can remember folding my arms on the table and resting my chin on them as the main character fell through the trees. But that’s not actually the memory that stayed.

The thing I remember now isn’t the film. It’s laughing together while quoting it back and forth. It’s the conversations between scenes. The online game where film quotes followed double eliminations.  The comfortable silliness of the whole afternoon, and the quiet relief of realising I’d been paying attention after all.  

The film wasn’t really the memory. It was simply where the memory happened.

I spend a long time describing myself as an unreliable narrator. Increasingly, I wonder if that’s unfair. An unreliable narrator tells the wrong story. My memory doesn’t seem to do that. It simply files things differently. Not by chronology.

By association. By texture. By music. By wool. By the weight of a favourite coffee mug.

By the objects that quietly volunteer to remember alongside me. Maybe confidence in memory isn’t believing you’ll always remember everything. Maybe it’s trusting that forgetting something isn’t the same as losing it.

Or losing yourself.

Because memory, I’ve slowly realised, has always been a collaborative effort. Some of it lives in me.

The rest waits patiently in scarves, playlists, coffee mugs and fridge magnets until one ordinary Tuesday they quietly hand me a piece of myself back.