This is my fourth year writing an annual review of my most special memories. Every year, the collections have gotten longer; I’m getting getting better at living life with my eyes open for the moments I want to keep forever… Memory is fickle, and we lose so much of our lives — not just the mundane, but the truly sublime as well. These posts are my attempts to hold on.

Maybe more than any other year, this was the one that made me wish I could keep all the memories. But that’s not how memory works. Memory selects the shiny, the sublime, the emotionally intense; and, as always, this exercise for myself is about the beautiful.

Each year brings good and bad, light and dark, joy and pain. I try to hold it all as it comes: soak up the piercing beauty, excavate silver linings, find meaning in the highs and lows of being human. But memory is a finicky thing; it discards what seems like most of our lives, holding onto just a few glimmering moments. So here are a few of my moments, as they unfolded through this year.

It’s wonderful, the way time smooths edges and crystalizes beauty. Every year brings good and bad, light and dark, joy and pain. It’s true, the scale on 2020 seems tilted, but there was beauty even here. And memory is a finicky thing; it discards what seems like most of our lives, holding onto just a few glimmering moments. Here are a few of my moments, as they unfolded through this year.