HOW TO REMEMBER
How to Remember
I cannot tell you my first memory. I cannot tell you the first time that I remember feeling
— feeling pain, feeling emotion, feeling anything that told me that I was alive. I can tell you
how the air feels stuffy on my skin now, and I can say that I thought it was too warm yesterday,
but I cannot say when that sense of feeling started. When did my nerves develop to sense the
textures of the world, and when did my tongue grow enough that it could catalog different tastes?
When I was 5 I was transfixed by the dense and inviting field of green trees across from
my cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood. The forest was later chopped down, the remnants of
the palmettos and pines removed to make way for a slug of more strip malls. But in my juvenile
transfixion, I did not foresee the tears that came when I saw men — clad in neon yellow and
commanding hunks of metal — ripping away the stumps of those roots. During that moment,
staring out the backseat window, I was rather thinking of a year prior when I got scolded for
attempting to follow a squirrel over the forest fence.
Studies from Memorial University of Newfoundland argue that adults have the ability to
remember their life after the age of two and a half, but there's a fault to that narrative,
telescoping. Adults may remember what they did when there were two and a half, but their
internal timeline shifts the event to an older age, distorting their own knowledge of themselves.
Perhaps a thirty-three year old woman can have a stark memory of when she was eleven and got
food poisoning from an amusement park — while in reality that event happened when she was
seventeen.
Our first memories are not marked as a definable point, where life begins clouded in dark
and then someone flips a memory switch. No, early memories are more agile. They arise from a
mushy mess of potential. My memories are definitely clouded and altered by myself, lacking
veracity in terms of the true nuances of the event. I often find myself twisting just one aspect of
the narrative until the story becomes so tangled I can’t even find its roots.
I knew at that moment, looking past the trees, that I remembered my life from two years
before that car ride, but the memories of the time before felt out of reach. I couldn’t recall the
first food I ate, how the mushy food felt in my then-toothless mouth, or the first time I stubbed
my toe on my kitchen counter. I didn’t remember the first bite of snow or the first time I got too
close to the stove and scarred my hand.
“Mom,” I started my question, waiting until her eyes caught mine in the rear-view mirror
to continue. “Do you remember what it felt like to be five?”
“Only bits and pieces,” was my mom's four-word reply to the question that felt like the
hallmark of my month. She barely took any time to think about it as she was focused on driving
us safely, but yet she smiled at me as if her answer would satisfy. My silence, instead, was a
response; my mom continued:
“I remember the memories that were told to me, by my parents and older brother and
older sister, but you know I don’t really remember how it felt being five.”
Her response felt like a lie — did my older sister have the ability to have that much
control over how I remembered myself. To me, that reply made me think my entire sense of self
was a fraud. What if when I got older, and I would no longer remember how I was feeling on this
car ride? What if every action I did would just be forgotten by everyone, including myself?
In that sense, I would cease to exist.
I have witnessed the collapse of an aged brain and overheard the tough conversation that
details the path of how the mind will deteriorate and leave one in a hollowed body, void of any
memories. The echoes of my internet searches of Lewy Body Dementia or Alzheimer's floated to
my mind the moments I felt thoughts escape me. My keyboard was showered with tears over
ailing people I have never met with names of illnesses I did not understand. But I cried because I
thought they were on the path of the forgotten.
If memory starts, then it must end too. People may regress back into their youth, tethered
by the grasp of dementia. People hold tightly to their memories, their own catalog of their life.
That is why they and their loved ones always cry when they hear a diagnosis of a
memory-robbing disease. We fear our partners will forget us and all the memories we’ve shared.
The victim may fear that they won’t even know themselves once they lose access to their
memories, but nonetheless, we will weep together. Mourning the life forgotten.
I told my five-year-old self my memory was good — my memory was better than my
mom's. I knew how to count to 1,000 all from memory, after all. If I could remember 1000
numbers, I could surely remember each and every moment of 100 years, or however long I lived.
I have been scared of forgetting before I even learned how to grow up.
That day, my mom must have noticed the way my eyebrows scrunched, creating
premature wrinkles on my forehead. She must have saw the way my mouth tended to morph into
a line when I was puzzled. She did what she thought would statify me: prove my memory wrong.
When she asked and I realized that I couldn’t remember who my first friend actually was,
I clenched my teeth so that my mouth could not move to admit it.
She then tried to counsel me and tell me that it isn't so scary to forget and how it would
be scarier if a person always remembered everything.
“If you remembered perfectly the feeling of every papercut you have ever gotten — you
would be too scared to ever read again,” my mom said gesturing to the sack of library books on
the empty shotgun seat.
But I still couldn’t get my undeveloped mind to understand. She promised me it is kinder
to forget; it is easier to leave the pain behind rather than to let it always swim through your brain.
Someone with everything contained in their memory would simply explode. But five-year-old
me would rather explode than forget what it felt like to be five.
When I was eight, I visited a room tucked away to the back of a medical school: a
museum of trapped brains. Each one spliced, pinned, dyed, and suspended in a viscous fluid.
I meandered through the glass boxes, with a nauseous twist above my gut but a lust behind my
eyes; staring at each fold of the tissues, I wondered if within the crevices they withheld the
memories of the life they once shepherded.
I learned that when we die, scientists have proposed the theory that the watershed
moments of our lives are flashed before us due to “generating oscillations in memory retrieval”
(per Maryam Clark/ Frontiers). Is this replay of memories simply a rewind that effectively resets
the brain or do these memories transcend the abyss of death.
When staring at the brains marked as dementia-ridden, I wonder what those who can no
longer remember see during their oscillations.
But then the queasiness from my gut then rose to my throat as I was overwhelmed by the
grips of fear. Whether fear of death or fear of nothingness I was unsure. I escorted myself from
the brains before my insides turned out.
When I was ten, I looked through my sticker-decked sparkly scrapbook. The scrapbook
that I recall obsessively decorating with traded doo-das from a classmate whose name I now
forgot. I realized all my memories of being three came from those pictures of my trip to beach or
retold stories of the tantrums I had on the boardwalk.
My memory was being fabricated from the images I saw of myself. I pretended to
remember that day I collected flowers on the hill that turned out to just be weeds. I pretended to
remember the floral skirt I wore that day that my grandma picked out at a fair in New York City.
But the memory doesn’t go past the details in the photo and the scribbled notes in the margins.
Perhaps that hill was next to my school or maybe it was behind the community pool. Perhaps
after collecting the weeds/flowers I stumbled and scraped my kneecaps or perhaps instead I
skipped home and scattered them across my porch.
My memories were skewed and based on the images that were cataloged, leaving gaps
for the days that no one had a camera. So that day, I promised myself I would never forget
another name. In each photo, I listed each of my friends' and peers' names just in case the day
came when they escaped my mind.
At fifteen years of age, I have realized that I simply do not have time to catalog every
name of everyone I encounter. I don’t have the room in my brain to store conversations that the
other person has long forgotten. Where my memory starts and ends is not within my control, so
the most I can do is catalog the few moments I can that etched my heart or contorted my mind—
whether good or bad. So that when I forget tomorrow, or in sixty years when I may be stolen by
dementia, I can come back and read to remind myself. I will leave a record that transcends the
strip malls that might be erected upon my memory. But I am still figuring out how to manage the
dangerous task of choosing how my future self will see me now.
I am seventeen, and I am scared of being lost to myself.
Prose
‘Growing up I have always been fascinated by the inner workings of the brain, especially when pertaining to the mechanisms of remembering. So, in this piece I wanted to explore the intersection of the more scientific basis of memory, with the emotional connection and dependence that I have experienced to my own memories.”