aefenglommung (aefenglommung) wrote,
aefenglommung
aefenglommung

Chasing ghosts

I've been e-mailing back and forth with my older sister Clare concerning stuff that happened in my early childhood. It's stirred up a lot of very old memories. Then, to chase down another memory -- from junior high -- I opened up a bunch of old school yearbooks.

It's a strange and disturbing experience to go back over one's life this way. Seeing it from the outside in text and photos while at the same time remembering seeing it from the inside -- looking at while at the same time looking out from -- is a bit disorienting.

Rather than feeling that one is finding and re-establishing possession of something precious, one feels that one's own childhood is more a lost world than Opar or Pellucidar. I feel like an exile. Perhaps the immense amount of moving I've done in my life has something to do with this. Constantly changing environments and schools and workplaces leads to a habit of repeated memory dumps. What survives from the past is fragmented and patchy, and seems almost to belong to somebody else.

So all in all, I'm feeling a little down -- and very weird -- today.
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