Some of my earliest haziest recollections from childhood were there. More feeling than memory but apparently still hard-wired somewhere between my ears. I remember...
All of my life I've had a faint, black and white picture stored away in a dusty place where I keep all the oldest things I can still find. It's only a moment like a photo but one that has been there always. If I had archives, this would be the first entry...
I can see my mother sitting in a chair in the house where I grew up. And I know it's me seeing her, not something someone told me that I turned into a memory. I'm looking up at her. I can't see her face but I know it's her. I know that I am very small because I know she's holding me in her lap and saying something that I can't understand. But I know it's her voice and that somehow everything is alright. It was safe and cozy. There are no colors, no words, just feelings that I can only describe as love. It's so vague that it doesn't seem real but somehow I know it is. There's nothing before it and nothing for a long time after. It is very old and much treasured. Very small and yet somehow very valuable. I suspect it's the very beginning of me.
What would make that tiny slice of time turn into something I would still remember now and again after all these years? I'm sure it came from something that actually happened but is it possible for someone who couldn't have been much more than a baby to even form a memory? I suppose it must be because there it is, still living amidst all the trillions of other events and recollections that are my life. I hold onto it like an anchor. It feels somehow like it shouldn't be lost.
It doesn't intrude but no matter how many times I visit that place, it never changes. I don't know how I know but I don't doubt it was real and true. And try as I might to look deeper into the dark, there's nothing I can find that goes back any further. Was that the moment I woke up in the world for the first time? Does everyone have one of these that they've forgotten or buried? Why can I still find it when I usually can't remember a phone number or what day it is?
It makes me wonder sometimes how much that one almost lost instant so long ago affected everything that came after. Did that form the first step in the line of all the rest? What would I have been like without it? Did the anchor I grabbed actually steer the course?
I suppose a Freudian would have a field day with thinking like this so maybe I'll dedicate this remembrance to science someday. I don't know if my donor card covers it like it does my kidneys and lungs but who knows?
There is a saying that anything ever put on the internet lives forever. If that's true then when I hit 'publish', that gauzy little ancient slice of me will become something that finally got out into the world.
Maybe that's what the shades wanted all along. You're welcome.
