Every 3 or 4 years, on an evening at home alone, I will look up my childhood home on Google maps and street map travel through the area.
Some of these roads are newly paved. Oh, a kid on my bus route used to live there. I wonder how long the bridge has been closed. That driveway is nearly fully overgrown. I remember hiking back to see how dilapidated the house was. Did that really happen? Or did I dream that? No, I definitely remember doing it for real.
Sometimes I only glance around the neighborhood. Other times I take longer trips. To my elementary school. My junior high. The elementary school where my mother taught and also died in the parking lot. You can kind of see the parking lot from the street view.
This is not because I’m doing some sort of emotional self-flagellation ritual (I tell myself and then write down so it’s definitely true). Some of it is for genuine nostalgia, I’m sure. But mostly I believe it’s because I’m checking my memories. I have no one from my past to confirm anything I remember. I have no one to reminisce with. No one to talk to about the fireflies (lightning bugs, if you please) and the ice skating and the confederate flag flying fuckos who needed to be kicked out of the punk shows. And the woods. And the woods. And the woods.
If I didn’t take a virtual drive down memory lane, road, or pike, how could I be sure that anything I remember even happened? And I guess every few years I need to be reminded that my life actually happened.
There was a bit in my memoir about a man who painted rocks. I couldn’t remember his name, only something that sounded like it. This was someone who would have died 30 years ago. I had tried looking it up multiple times, but had never found a confirmation of the memory. Just this past month, someone emailed me to confirm their existence, and name.
I was so comforted by the information. That these memories from so long ago are real. That I still have some sort of hold on reality. It’s me, the real memory-haver!
Constantly needing to cross-reference my recollections with confirmation is surely one of a thousand PTSD reactions. Hyper-vigilance includes not just your physical surroundings, not just your digital surroundings, but the whole of reality itself. Always on guard. Always needing proof. Always tense. Always a little bit scared. Building a vault of facts to fight against gaslighting.
It would make sense that my current exceptional levels of isolation (exceptional even for plague standards) would have me reaching out for some sort of solid thing in the world.
Good news, as of tonight, I think I still exist. I’ll keep you updated on any changes.
