We are always seeing other people's lives from the outside.

Even those we know well.

We see the choices they make.

The things they keep.

The stories they tell.

The photographs they return to.

The moments that make them laugh.

The ones they rarely speak about.

And from what we can see, we begin to understand them.

Or at least—

we think we do.

Two people can stand in the same room and leave carrying different memories of what happened there.

A photograph that makes one person smile may make another look away.

A story told fondly by one person may be remembered differently by someone else who was there.

Neither experience needs to correct the other.

They belonged to different people.

Even our own understanding does not always remain still.

Something that once embarrassed us may eventually make us laugh.

A place we could not wait to leave may become somewhere we remember fondly.

A decision we once regretted may look different from further down the road.

And sometimes nothing changes at all.

Time does not promise us a different understanding.

It simply gives us the possibility of one.

Perhaps this is why another person's meaning deserves a certain humility from us.

We can listen.

We can ask.

We can remember what they told us.

We can sit beside an experience that we may never completely understand.

But there is a difference between witnessing someone's story—

and deciding what it means.

Sometimes the kindest response is not an answer.

Not an interpretation.

Not:

“This is what that meant.”

Perhaps it is simply:

“What did it mean to you?”

There may not always be an answer.

Perhaps the person does not know.

Perhaps the answer changes.

Perhaps there are things they would rather leave unexplained.

That belongs to them too.

To care about someone's story does not require us to understand all of it.

Sometimes care is simply making room for the story to remain theirs.

To listen without correcting.

To wonder without concluding.

To be curious without claiming.

There are things we may never understand about the people we love.

Things they carried privately.

Choices we would have made differently.

Memories that mattered for reasons we cannot see.

Perhaps knowing someone does not mean solving them.

Perhaps it means allowing some part of them to remain unknowable.

We can ask.

We can listen.

We can be there.

But eventually, we reach the edge of what belongs to us.

And at that edge—

we never decide.