The Girl Who Remembered Everything

I met her when we were both nine.

She sat alone under the jacaranda tree behind the school library, her fingers tracing invisible patterns in the dirt. Her name was Hana. She had hair like wet ink and eyes the color of dusk just before it surrendered to night. No one talked to her, and she didn’t seem to mind.

I only approached her because I’d lost my lunch. Literally — it had vanished. My banana was gone, my sandwich was flattened under my math book, and my juice box had exploded. I was a mess of crumbs and juice stains, and she must have noticed, because without a word, she slid half her apple toward me.

“You don’t talk much,” I said between bites.

She blinked. “I remember too much.”

It was a strange thing to say, but we were kids. Everything was strange.

We became friends, the kind that don’t need explanations. I’d talk and she’d listen, eyes always watching, not with judgment but with quiet understanding. She never forgot anything. Not birthdays, not bad grades, not the way Mrs. Farris once called me "hopeless" in front of the class. Hana stored it all, like her mind was a glass jar collecting time itself.

By high school, her memory was legend. People would test her.

“What color was Principal Donahue’s tie on the last day of seventh grade?”

“Paisley. Blue and gold.”

“How many times has Benji thrown up in class?”

“Three. Once after chicken nuggets, twice after gym.”

She never smiled when she answered. It wasn’t a party trick to her. It was a weight.

One day, I asked her what the worst thing was that she remembered. We were sitting on her porch. Summer was melting the edges of the sky, and cicadas screamed in the trees.

She didn’t look at me when she spoke. “My dad’s hands.”

I waited. Sometimes silence was her way of choosing words carefully.

“I was six. He held my mom’s wrist too tight. Pulled her so hard she hit the counter and cracked a tooth. There was blood in the sink. He looked at me like I didn’t exist. But I remember it. Every detail. The smell of garlic from the dinner she’d cooked. The sound the plate made when it shattered. Her crying. I was too scared to move. I still hear it, sometimes.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just held her hand, and she didn’t let go.

In college, we drifted. Different cities. Different majors. I heard she took up neuroscience. I wondered if she was trying to fix the very thing that made her different.

We reconnected at 27. She had started a blog, anonymously, sharing stories—others’ and her own—under the title The Memory Keeper. She never named names, never gave herself away, but I recognized her voice instantly.

One post stopped me cold. It was about a boy who used to sit beside her under a jacaranda tree. “He was my only friend,” she wrote. “He made forgetting feel less necessary. But I never told him that. I was afraid I’d ruin it by remembering it too much.”

I called her that night.

“I read it,” I said.

She didn’t ask which one. She knew.

She laughed, soft and short. “I hoped you would.”

And just like that, we became us again.

But time, it turns out, doesn’t care about friendships or love stories or even memory. Time just moves.

When Hana got sick, it was cruelly ironic. A rare neurological disorder. One that didn’t just threaten her body — it came for her mind. Piece by piece, her memories were slipping away.

“It’s funny,” she whispered once, when I visited her in the hospice. “Most people want to remember more. I wanted to remember less. Now I’m afraid I won’t remember you.”

She was fading, but her eyes were still the color of dusk.

“You don’t have to remember me,” I said. “I’ll remember you.”

I do. Every day.

I remember her handwriting — small and slanted. The way she twirled pens in her fingers. How she knew facts she wished she could forget, and how she carried them like invisible bruises.

I remember that she once told me: “Some memories are blessings. Others are burdens dressed in silence.”

Hana remembered everything, until she couldn’t.

So now, I remember for her.Start writing...