I say that because during the course of a given day it will kick out things that I thought I'd have had the common sense to forget or discard even decades ago, and they come back with such accuracy that they feel like they happened yesterday.
How freaky is it? How about this...
I remember being born.
That's not a joke. The first memory I have is of going from total darkness, to such blinding light that I can't see anything and after a few seconds, the sound I hear is my own crying. The truly weird thing is that I don't have another cognizant memory that stuck in my head until I was about two years-old. But that minute moment in time has remained locked in my memory banks ever since.
The even crazier thing is what can trigger one of those memories to come right back to the forefront of my mind. It could be a song lyric, a picture, or even something totally unrelated to what it brings back to me.
Case in point. I was sitting here at my desk yesterday doing my work and out of nowhere, I got blasted by a memory of my trip to outdoor school in fifth grade at J.R. Briggs Elementary School in Ashburnham, Mass. We went to a camp in Connecticut for a week and did the whole outdoor school experience, but this one day we were doing a nature hike and came across another group in a clearing, oblivious to our being there in the brush. The counselor decides to we need to do a "sneak attack" on them, and being amped about the idea, I of course went along.
We get set, he says go, and we all come flying out full-speed and for whatever reason, I shout out "AIR RAID!!" which totally spooks the other group and blew the element of surprise we'd had. Nobody talked to me again for the rest of the day because of that.
Now where that came from, I don't know. Why it decided to replay in my head at that particular moment, I also do not know. I wish I did, but it seems so rooted in my subconscious that it's almost like playing a game with me.
"Let me throw this out there for you and see what you can do with it," it says.
Now to be fair, not every flashback I get is a bad one. I've had just as many with friends and loved ones that I'm glad I haven't forgotten as they provide a good counterweight.
It shocks the people around me sometimes with the things I remember and to be honest, it does for me too because of the quasi-randomness of it. Some make me happy and some are embarrassing or highly regrettable. The problem is that in a given day, I don't know what I'm going to get hit with, but they always come whether I want them to or not.
Second case in point. In the time it took me to write this out, I went back through a memory of being in first grade and my brother and I walking to school, nearly two miles away from our apartment in Gardner, Mass., in a driving snowstorm. Because we weren't sure if we had to go or not, but we didn't want to be late, out into the cold we went. We got to the front doors of Holy Rosary only to be told by one of the nuns that they'd closed, so we ended up having to walk all the way back.
*Editorial Note - Yes I walked uphill, both ways, and there was already about a foot of snow on the ground because it had already snowed that week. But I had shoes on and no, I didn't have to fight off a grizzly bear with my spiral notebook.
I also had a recall of being on stage for the first time, as a fourth-grader, dressed as a clown in bright orange pants, black suspenders and a white dress shirt, and I was singing no less. It was a song about being in the circus, because otherwise, why would I have been dressed up as a clown?
How many more of them I'll get before the day's over? I have no idea. I don't know if I'll entirely get used to it either.
They're just the things I find myself thinking about all the time.
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