People talk--regularly--about how they can remember "every detail" of some event or other, about how they can smell the smells, and see what they were wearing, even recall which member of N'Sync they were most into at that exact moment...
...so much of the time, I feel like I'm working off snapshots from a very poorly-documented slide reel stuffed somewhere in a parental attic.
Sure, I remember SOME stuff. Kinda. Sometimes.
But especially when I talk about my childhood, I feel like a sense of texture is missing. I can imagine myself in my dad's den, staring into the weird half-height cupboard crammed full of little-kid books I'd sometimes read anyway; or I can picture the Slim Jim can Perek and I cut a hole in to use as our "club dues" bank, sitting on a shelf of the spiderwebby shed; I even remember staring contests with the mounted mountain goat head in the basement (Perek and I got bored sometimes)--I see moments, and if I tried, I could probably sort the photos into a mental album that was roughly chronological, but I don't remember what it felt like to be any of those people.
Do other people have a sense of what they actually were at different ages and stages that I'm just totally deficient for lacking? Or is this normal--to have a collection of discrete moments as your past, not a film reel?
Either way, I find it upsetting. There's such a tangible loss.
Not of anything big and important--although I think my memory gaps the most around the kinds of "major" events I think people would expect me to remember (my friend Kathleen Hale and I were talking about this lately, and I have a sense that my memory seeming to have an at-will erase button isn't the default for everyone)--but a loss nonetheless.
I was a kid who used to save the bags things came in because I could remember what they'd held, where they'd come from, and throwing them away felt like tossing scraps of my own memory--myself--away.
Part of me--the part that has never seen Hoarders--thinks I might have had the right idea...
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