Member-only story
My Earliest Memory
A creative non-fiction spurt — a burst from the past
It’s back to the beginning — back to when I started collecting memories in the cache of my brain and wishing I could change things even though I had so little in my palms.
The room is familiar, one I’ll see in pictures years later even though I won’t remember being there. Maybe I was dissociating even back then, lost to a world of my own even as the real world rumbled around outside me, divorced from my inner life.
The television — a box number, one you wouldn’t see now — sits flashing scenes. I think it’s a travelogue, someone’s trip overseas. Even then, it was an ache in me to see beyond my sphere of life — but that wasn’t meant to happen. I would always be stuck, I think, in my little world with my little things.
My mom and dad are somewhere nearby, but even then I’m not focusing on them. I’m focusing on bigger things — like Disney World, like ocean waves, like the touch of what those things might mean for me if only I might grasp them. But that world is so far away. It will be a long time before I ever see these things for myself.
The television becomes my gateway to another world, and I sit there for hours and wish I could transport myself to a world that doesn’t hurt like this one does.
