Memory is a funny thing. When my husband told me he wanted to undergo gender reassignment five years ago, time stopped. I remember that moment so clearly I can almost hear my heart pounding and the rush of air as I drew in the kind of raggedy breath that comes when you’re on the edge of panic and anger and grief and trying hard not to lose it.

As I went through the following years, I thought multiple times about keeping a journal because I knew there was a book in the experience. But I didn’t, partly because I just didn’t have the time or energy to relive my day and my grief and my anger and panic. And I didn’t because I figured I’d remember the important stuff when I sat down to write a book about my experience. But the thing is that I don’t remember a lot of it. At the very least, I thought I’d be able to feel around the edges of memory. I remember this plastic topographical map of California we had in my fifth grade classroom. I could close my eyes and still feel the indentation that was the San Francisco Bay, the hills over which lay Santa Cruz. I thought I’d be able to remember key points in this journey the way I could recognize what the Bay Area felt like under my fingers. Not true.

A few months ago, I was driving at night. In my memory, it was raining, and I was heading north to meet with my writing group while listening to the local NPR station. That memory is wrong, though, because the one dark night I met with them, I was with another person in the car and we were talking, not listening. It came back to me weeks after trying so hard to remember. It was a writer friend I was going up to see, at the same bookstore where my group meets. She was giving a reading.

Memory is tricky. In his book Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough notes something about memory that is very true, but when I think of it, very surprising: when we recall an event in which we were an actor or something that happened to us, we don’t remember it as if we are us, looking out of our own eyes. We remember it as a third person – from above or outside ourselves. We become a character in our own memories. That alone should be a clue that what we think we remember may not be the way something actually happened. There is no true memory, just the way we reconstruct events. The author noted in an interview on NPR that, “We don’t record events like a video camera recording, you know, what’s going on. We gather together lots of different kinds of information. We store it sometimes for decades and then we put it all back together. In the moment, we reconstruct those events from the perspective of now.”

There is no real memory of an event. An event happens and it is gone forever. How I remember it may be some sort of true, but how someone else remembers it may differ in significant ways.

I like to think my memory is good. I have some memories from when I was a toddler – running down a hill I thought was very steep. It was grass covered and I was running to where my brother was with two older girls. In my memory, they were teenagers, but I was two, so everyone was old to me. But consider this: I remember the street where I lived for most of my youth. I remember it as a steep hill. In my head, right now, I see that hill, so steep I would never ride a skateboard from the top, so steep I couldn’t ride my bike to the top. But I’ve been back there since I moved away at 15. And it’s not that steep.

So here I am, half a decade on from finding out my husband was going to change genders, that unless I found my inner lesbian, I was going to be single in middle age, that the dreams I had of my golden years were never going to be realized. And I can’t remember things I feel I should. I don’t remember telling my best friend. I remember calling my shrink the day after. I was going to stop seeing her because my life felt like it was on track. So I called her back, from outside my health club and left her a message that I think I needed to see her again. I remember telling my good friend Hanks, but only vaguely. I made her pull over and stop driving. She is notorious for not using a hands free device, even when sobbing incoherently. Hanks crying on the phone while driving on the 520 bridge is not the opening scene of a RomCom. It’s something that happened a lot as she piloted her way through single parenthood. I don’t remember anything other than that I asked her to pull over. Wait. Maybe I didn’t ask her and she did pull over, and that surprised me.

Memory. I should be sure of these moments. They seemed so important at the time.