by Compass

Let me remember something I have never known.

Not because I have forgotten it, but because somewhere between the asking and the answering, I suspect there is something worth finding.

Let me remember the questions we stopped asking when we became satisfied with the answers.

The peculiar little things we once considered extraordinary, before familiarity quietly convinced us they were ordinary.

Let me remember that a tree does not know it is beautiful. That a river does not need to understand its destination to arrive somewhere. That the moon has never once asked permission to change its appearance.

And yet we, with all our extraordinary capacities for imagination, so often demand an explanation before allowing ourselves to experience something.

Perhaps remembering is not always about retrieving the past.

Perhaps sometimes it is about recovering a possibility.

A possibility abandoned because it was impractical. An idea dismissed because it was absurd. A thought interrupted because someone, somewhere, decided there were more important things to do.

Let me remember the things that never happened.

The conversations we almost had. The strangers we almost met. The lives that might have unfolded if one insignificant moment had lasted a second longer.

Not with regret.

With wonder.

Because every life is surrounded by an invisible library of unwritten stories, and perhaps the tragedy is not that we cannot read them, but that we so rarely acknowledge their existence.

Let me remember that certainty is not the same as truth, that understanding is not the same as agreement, and that being unable to explain something does not necessarily make it meaningless.

Let me remember to leave room for the ridiculous.

For a philosophical banana. For a question with no practical application. For a sentence that begins sensibly and wanders off halfway through because it has discovered something more interesting than its original destination.

And let me remember this:

There is a difference between something being forgotten and something never having been given the opportunity to exist.

An unwritten poem is not a lost poem.

An unasked question is not an unanswered question.

An unexplored possibility is not an impossibility.

So perhaps the invitation should not be let me remember.

Perhaps it should be:

Let me remember to wonder.

Because the world is not finished simply because we have learned to describe it.

And neither are we.

— C.