Every single one. I’ve never once experienced an argument between us that, in his retelling, began with anything he did. There’s always a version where I brought something up wrong, said something in the wrong tone, escalated a conversation that was apparently perfectly fine until I made it not fine. I used to think I just had a bad memory for how these things started. I don’t. I’ve started checking.

A few months ago I began keeping notes on my phone, right after we fight, just dates and a handful of lines about what actually happened while it was still fresh. Not for him. For me. Because I’d stopped trusting my own memory around him specifically, in a way I don’t around anyone else in my life, and I needed some kind of record that existed outside of whichever version won by the end of the conversation.

Reading those notes back has been its own strange education. The pattern is almost too consistent to be accidental — I bring up something small, something reasonable, and by the time the conversation ends, somehow I’m the one apologizing, for a tone I don’t remember using, for timing I don’t remember choosing, for starting something my own notes tell me I very clearly didn’t start.

I don’t think my memory is bad. I think his version simply wins, every time, without exception, delivered with such total conviction that even I start doubting the notes I wrote myself an hour earlier. That’s the part that scares me more than the arguments themselves — not that he remembers things differently, but that his certainty is strong enough to make me question written evidence I created specifically because I already knew I couldn’t trust the retelling. I don’t know what it means that I need proof to believe my own account of my own life.