When you remember being a young child you don’t remember anything whole—just little bits and pieces, here and there. Like a bill, something printed on thin paper, left in a jacket pocket for a year, more, and then you find it and most of the words are faded, just the odd gray mark spared.
Sunlight slanting through a window, on a day when something clicked inside you, and you knew it was fall—something about the granularity of the light. The feel of a bigger hand holding yours as you walked down the street, jumping over cracks. Splashing in the pool, the light making jewels on the surface.
People say smell is the sense most closely linked to memory, but they’re full of it. Sure, a smell can trigger a memory. But when you look back on your childhood, you don’t think, hey, I remember when I smelled gas for the first time, at that gas station, do you? No. There’s a clue in the phrasing—you LOOK back.
When I look back at my very early childhood, I see parts, little lost moments, like Jeffrey Dahmer has hacked up the past with a saw. But there’s one that’s still whole; one bubble of time, glistening, unpopped.
I walk with my (mom) to a playground, somewhere. Maybe in Albuquerque? I don’t know. I know there are a couple of trees, and the grass is brown and dry, so it must be summer. The playground is pretty much empty; it’s a school day. I’m three, maybe four. I feel very small, next to my (mom); I remember that. I have a feeling like I’m tiny but the whole world is inside me, this contradictory feeling; it’s almost like a dizziness.
I’m not sure what we do first. I guess (Mom) pushes me on the swing, something like that. My memory has decided that the first part is not important. But it has kept the next part, hugging it close, like some sentimental object it doesn’t want to let go of, to let slip into the blackness.
I walk over to the slide. It’s a big one, bigger than I’m used to. It’s set on like a hill, man-made, instead of having steps up to it. I look at it, and I feel like I’m looking at a building or something, it’s so high up. The sun gleams on it, whitely. It’s as if the metal is melting.
Too high, I say, with my hands—I guess (Mom) has already been teaching me sign.
It’s okay, honey, she says. It’s just like any slide, only bigger.
No, I say.
But you love slides, says (Mom).
I look at it again. I shake my head.
You want to go on it with me? says (Mom). She takes my hand. She’s smiling down at me, her head blotting out the sun, like she’s filling the sky.
I nod.
She picks me up and carries me to the top of the little hill of dirt—there are scrubby little clumps of grass on it, the whole thing worn away by kids climbing up it. When we get to the top, she sits down on the slide, then puts me on her lap, and we—
whoosh, down to the bottom, her arms tight around me, and in my memory it’s like dropping through space itself, like being a shooting star, but belonging, at the same time; a shooting star in a family of meteors maybe, drifting through nothingness together; like a safe kind of falling.
This is the lesson of the slide: it’s possible to feel fear, for your stomach to come loose and float up to your throat, but with no real danger.
Anyway.
When we get to the bottom, I look up at (Mom). Again, I say.
And so she carries me up again, and we go down, I don’t know how many times. Over and over. Just the two of us, me on her knees, wrapped around by her, until the sun started to set, pulling long shadows from the swingset and the seesaw. Then she walked me home, her arm holding me, and the moon was full above us and it made me feel lonely to look at it; lonely and cold, which only made the warmth of her around my shoulders even better, even more like home.
The question is:
Knowing what I know now, knowing that my mom was never my mom, is this memory real? I don’t mean, did it happen. Because I’m pretty sure it did.
I mean:
How am I supposed to feel about it? What am I supposed to do with it? Before, it meant certain things in my head, and it was the image that came into my mind when those things were spoken. Things like: belonging; things like: safety.
Now it means lies.