I record things and never post them

I record the ordinary things.

Not birthdays, not sunsets, not the moments already dressed for memory. I mean the half-finished conversations in the kitchen, someone laughing before they can finish the sentence, the sound of a person saying my name from another room. A hand reaching across the table for soy sauce. A bad joke. The way somebody looks when they have forgotten there is a camera pointed at them.

Most of these videos never get posted. They were never made for an audience.

I keep them because I have learned that the smallest moments become the ones grief steals first. You remember that someone made you laugh, but not the exact sound. You remember sitting beside them, but not how their knee touched yours under the table. Memory is cruel that way. It keeps the feeling and slowly misplaces the furniture.

Sometimes I record more when I suspect someone may not stay.

Perhaps that sounds morbid. Maybe it is. But some part of me has always known when a season is beginning to close. So I become an archivist of things no one else would think worth saving. Five seconds of laughter. A voice saying, wait, what? Someone chewing badly. Proof of life before it becomes the past.

I know people who delete everything when love ends. They empty the camera roll, erase the thread, remove every photograph as if cleanliness might convince the body nothing happened.

I cannot do that.

I keep the evidence.

Not because I want them back. Not because I spend my nights reopening old graves. Most days the videos sleep where I left them, years passing quietly over their thumbnails.

But sometimes I find one by accident.

And there we are.

Still laughing.

Still unaware.

Still belonging to one another for another fourteen seconds.

I think there is tenderness in allowing the dead versions of our lives to remain intact somewhere. I do not need to destroy who I was simply because she loved someone I no longer know.

She was happy there. I let her keep it.

Because if I once loved someone, some version of me probably always will. Love changes jurisdiction. It loses its rights. It stops making decisions. But I don’t believe it has to be executed simply because the relationship ended.

So I keep the videos.

I don’t need the people in them to return.

I just don’t need to erase the proof that once, they were here.