The House Before Memory

I found the photograph in an old family album. A small child was standing in front of a building, and the child was me. I knew this because everyone said so, not because anything in the picture felt familiar.

I studied the doorway, the wall, and the narrow piece of street behind me. Nothing returned. No smell, no sound, no sudden image of a room. The photograph proved that I had been there, but it did not help me remember being there.

“You lived there until you were about two,” someone in the family told me. Two years sounded like a long time for a place that gave me absolutely nothing back. I must have slept there, been carried through those doors, looked through those windows, and learned small parts of the world in that house.

None of it belonged to my memory. It belonged to other people who had been old enough to remember for me. They could tell me what I was like, what I did, and where I slept, while I listened as if the story concerned another child.

That is one of the strange things about the beginning of a life. We live it before we can narrate it. Later, other people hand us pieces of that period, and we quietly add them to our own history.

After hearing the stories often enough, we begin saying, “I used to do that,” or “I lived there.” The sentences become ours even when the original memory never does.

I looked at the photograph once more. The child did not seem troubled by any of this. He was simply standing there, inside a life that had not yet learned how to remember itself.

Then I put the photograph back in the album. The house was still part of my past, but it belonged to a chapter written before I became the narrator.