My First Memory

This is my first memory [1]: I’m standing in front of the driveway of our new semi-constructed house—it’s a skeleton house, all timber and bones. There are bubbles inside me. I’ve just walked up the dirt road from our cottage all by myself. My father is shirtless. He is on the roof of the skeleton house. All men can create things, build things—even houses. I can build a house one day too. I’m on the dirt road and there’s gravel beneath my sneakers and the driveway is in front of me. The driveway is brick. And there’s two brick columns that rise up either side. And the front wall of the house is also brick; my grandpa is a bricklayer and can build houses. He builds this one with my dad. At the start of the driveway, between the columns, there is a concrete cattle grate that takes a lot of care to cross. The parts for my feet are only as big as my feet. The parts not for my feet are that big too. And then the memory skips to Part B, and I’m inside the ribcage of the skeleton house. Squares of the sky are visible above. The floor is dirt below. Mum is beside me. Our Shetland pony, Scruffy, beside her. The pony lifts its scruffy tail and poos—plop, plop, like rocks in water—on the dirt floor of the house, our house. Mum laughs, so I think it’s funny. Dad confirms its humour. The poo smells like nature to me. 

I can’t quite tell if this Part B to the memory is legitimate because I feel like there is a photo somewhere deep in some dusty album of me, Scruffy and Mum in the living room of our half-built house, and there’s a story (maybe) going around about Scruffy shitting on the floor. And I don’t want to ask my mother to find the possible-photo of this event because if it exists, my memory and what I remember is likely false, likely constructed by an older version of myself that saw that photo at one point and thought, Golly, this would be a nice early memory to have, charming, comic, familial. I might just claim it for myself, conjure it in my head and remember it as a real memory, so I have a story to tell when people ask. 

It’s disconcerting to realise that some of our memories—even the most important childhood ones, the ones that carry the most weight—could be fraudulent, manufactured by our own minds to fill in the big blank of those early years. We build our personalities upon these memories. And if our supports are fictitious, are we also false? 

I have a distinct memory of Dad’s claustrophobic freak-out as we descended a shaft into Delprat Mine. Now, I am burdened with claustrophobia too. And I have sharp recollections of my sisters barging into the bathroom; so today I’m overly private when I poo. And my preferred itchy long-haired aesthetic comes from how cool the long-haired Cougal boys were, my pie-love from the people at polocrosse, my stage fright from teenage slam poetry. My loathing of coffee plungers and tomato relish spawned from the stint I had as a kitchen hand. I don’t cherish these traits, but the bits of experience I have stored in my head tell me to uphold them, to continue to pursue this hate of relish and confined spaces. But what if these memories are fabricated? What if I invented them or had them implanted? If the events aren’t real—indeed, I can’t confirm they’re real—what’s the point of being claustrophobic, poo private, shaggy, etc.? There’s no longer justification for these unwanted quirks.

And this is only the start. It’s one thing to question why we uphold negative traits, and another to learn that all the good things you recall about life might not be real in the slightest. I remember Luke O'Brien fearing memory implantation when we studied Blade Runner in high school. Just like Tyrell’s Nexus-series Replicants (synthetic humans), Luke could not confirm the reality of his experiences. He woke and questioned if this waking was his first or several hundredth. He blinked and wondered if he had just come alive. And he was scared, because this meant all his friendships were phony and achievements unearned—poor Lukey. I hope you’re okay now, we all do. But don’t feel for him too much because the same thing can happen to you. Think about it: how do you know if your memories are real? The one of your Year 2 teacher congratulating your spelling in front of the class and the pride you felt and modesty you showed and the friendships you made because of it; and the memory of you being slighted by your parents and you running away from home and returning within an hour to find no one had noticed you’d gone; and time your parents let you bake in the kitchen and you turned it into a tempest of flour; the memory of you cuddling your first pup. It could all be fake, and you have no way of proving otherwise [2].

Another childhood anecdote: My friend is coming over. My house is on a faraway farm and all my friends live in town; they rarely visit. An hour before he is due to arrive, I perch upon the brick column on the right side of the driveway. I’m a capable climber for my age. Then, as a gargoyle, I wait, refusing to miss their arrival. My legs dangle and I swing my shoes and my knee-pits chafe on the rough column-lip. I hum. I’ve got a fishing rod that no one else can see and I cast the un-baited line into the sky. Fish swim like blimps. I catch them and throw them back. I catch, tag and release. One fish is red. One fish is yellow. I snag a fish, stand on the column and reel it in. I can’t remember if my friend ever arrives.