What can we trust if not our memory?

Last night, walking back from Jesse’s after watching The Substance, reflecting on the place of gore and horror with Kyle, my scepticism toward it, I was reminded of a memory of a particular kind, a memory that raises more questions than answers.

In What It Is, Lynda Barry asks (and asks, and asks) questions. The core of this ubergraphic-novel is a stream of rhetorical questions. (If you’re someone who wants to be journaling more, pick up What It Is and treat every question like a journaling prompt, you’ll be set for years.) Two questions leapt out for me this morning — Is a dream autobiography or fiction? and What is a memory? — both connected with the memory that surfaced last night.

It’s Halloween night and there’s a knock at the door. Little four year old me goes flying down the corridor, always racing to reach it before my brother, who in the same moment is thundering down the stairs. Ma’s in the kitchen. I don’t remember who reaches the door first, or who opens it, but I remember we all scream together. “No!”, ma screams from the kitchen, the realisation dawning on her a split-second before the reality hits us. Next comes my brother’s “blood curdling scream”. No one remembers if I scream or not, but I sink to the floor, unable to process the experience. Outside our front door, against a dark night sky, is a knight in full armour, atop a horse that — from my low vantage point — appears nearly two stories tall. Ma sprints through the house and slams the door. She spends the rest of the evening consoling her two distraught children, and a part of her will never forgive herself for this momentary lapse.

We all forgot it was Halloween.

So what’s so particular about this memory? The terror I felt in that moment was real and significant, but it isn’t what makes the memory unique. What makes this memory so interesting to me is that I know there was no knight and there was no horse. There were a handful of trick-or-treaters probably dressed in a selection of not particularly scary costumes I can’t remember.

The memory that formed around that event was distorted. All the rest of the memory is true to life, is exactly as my mother and brother remember it, all except for the knight and the horse. By one way of seeing the distortion is minor, a detail, but just as easily it could be called major. I remember something that did not occur. Moreover, it remains the memory even though I know it did not happen.

There are other stories that I know were reconstructed in my mind by other people holding the story for me, telling the story to me, recreating it for me; but this memory is one that never left me.

If a story is something we tell ourselves in order to understand something that happened, then perhaps my mind needed to construct the scariest version of that night in order to understand the fear I felt.

And a part of me is afraid of it still — afraid not of the knight, but of what it says about the frailty of my memory. If I can’t rely on my memory, what do I have? What am I?

But another part of me is helped by it, in it I find an opportunity for humility. When I get caught up in my version of a story, become too adamant in my way of seeing, I try to surface that memory, or at least the memory that my memory does fail me, not just by forgetting but by remembering too.