by Joann Kimberly Zerna
Someone hesitates just long enough to make silence noticeable. Their eyes search the table for a place to rest before finding the courage to return to us. For a moment, the story exists only in the quiet between what has been lived and what is about to be shared.
“Wait,” they say, “I’ve never told anyone this before.”
The room leans closer.
The story begins long before we enter it. It wanders through a childhood we never witnessed, brushes against an improbable coincidence, or circles back a heartbreak that still lingers in the shape of the person who left. By the time the silence returns, the person across the table seems somehow larger somehow, as though another room inside them has illuminated. Nothing about them has changed. We have simply been allowed to see a little farther into the life they were already carrying.
Lately, we’ve learned to call these stories lore.
The word belongs to the internet now. We joke about canon events. We call embarrassing mistakes ‘character development’ or say something happened ‘for the plot.’ The language is playful, yet it quietly reshapes the way we look at our own lives. We begin to search for the moments that feel story-worthy, forgetting that most of life unfolds outside the scenes we would ever think to tell.
Perhaps that’s why memory prefers stories.
It distills the years of our lives into a handful of defining moments—the friendship that changed everything, the rejection that quietly redirected us, the heartbreak that divided life into a before and after. Looking back, our lives begin to resemble narratives with clear turning points, as though meaning had been waiting there all along.
Life, however, is rarely lived that way.
Most days arrive looking exactly like yesterday. They move through lecture halls where fluorescent lights flatten every afternoon into the next, through jeepney rides measured by the familiar rattle of loose windows and the slow crawl of traffic, through evenings when a damp towel still hangs over the chair because tomorrow arrives before there’s time to fold it away. Nothing about these moments insists on being remembered. Yet they accumulate quietly, shaping us long before we notice they’ve done so.
There is a peculiar impatience to growing up now. We find ourselves wondering whether this friendship will become a story, whether this mistake is secretly building character, or whether this ordinary season is leading somewhere worth telling. We borrow the perspective of our future selves before we’ve finished being our present ones.
We spend so much time waiting for the next lore drop that we forget to notice the life unfolding between them. We wait for the conversation that will change everything, the opportunity that will finally make sense of the waiting, the coincidence that will one day sound beautiful enough to retell over dinner. We imagine that meaning arrives through revelation, forgetting that revelation only interrupts a life. It does not build one.
Lore may explain life. But the person who tells the story years later is formed in mornings that asked only to be lived, in routines so familiar they slipped quietly from memory, in evenings that ended without asking to be remembered—in the ordinary days that never became lore at all.
