neslo

Took this clear out of my LiveJournal (but edited it a bit for the sake of understandability). It's probably one of my most serious entries ever:

I got into a discussion with Lunna about memories. Not exactly sure how it happened, but I finally put into words something that's been on my mind many times in recent history.

In a thread on a forum I frequent, a friend of mine said something about LiveJournal that really pertains to what this entry is entirely about: "We can't trust our memories." The problem there is that in my earlier years, my family and I moved around a LOT. My dad was a Navy man, so we got transfered all over the place. I was never able to settle in and make and keep friends until late 1996 when we moved to Minnesota as his last transfer.

Everything before 1996 is a blur to me. All I can remember is stuff from my periods at different schools, and even then it's sketchy. I don't have much physical evidence of anything I did when I was little. I have no photos of me and my friends in each area. I have very little school work that I did. I only have photos of myself growing up, which are very vague. They also skip periods of time. I have pictures of me as a baby, pictures of me as a toddler, pictures of me as a really young child, and then BAM, pictures of me as a pre-pubescent child. Where the fuck is everything in between?

Because of my lack of photos and such, I don't know if certain things I remember are fact or fiction. Some things I "remember" happening seem so vivid and peculiar that I suspect they're imagined. For example, I remember a friend I had named John. He had blonde hair like mine, and he was really good at running. REALLY good. (Keep in mind that we both would have been 7 or 8 years old tops, if even that.) And then his mom, who was positively gorgeous (not the kind of thought a young child would enter into his mind), ended up having to move, and she took him with. And I saw him off, and I remember chasing after their red Jeep as they drove away. Touching, isn't it? But there's an aching feeling in my skull that tells me it never happened. And I have no way to verify if it ever did, and that really bugs me.

I've also been known to dream things up while sleeping, and then awaken to have them committed to memory as things that actually happened. Sometimes it hits me later that day or days later that it was all a dream. Sometimes it doesn't hit me at all until I run it by someone and have them tell me "Uh, no, you're crazy." I have the sneaking suspicion that there have been times it hasn't hit me at all. I might have dreams imprinted into my brain, interpreted as memories, without even knowing it. And that thought disturbs me. It makes me feel as though I'm living a lie. It makes me wonder very strongly how I turned out the way I did.