That is to say, you only heard from your previous states of mind on the same calendar date.
Which turns out to have been what you might call a saving grace.
It was like being knocked out.
I’d never been knocked out. Not then.
I woke… and… Well, I must have been about three months old.
My vision is the wrong shape. It’s like being in an enormous cinema with an oddly shaped screen. Everything in the background is a blur. I hear what I’m sure are words, but… I haven’t brought my understanding with me. It’s like that part of me can’t fit in a baby’s mind. This is terrifying, to hear the shapes of words but not know what they mean. I start yelling.
The baby that I’m part of starts yelling in exactly the same way!
And then… and then…
The big comfort shape moves into view. Such joy comes with it. Hello, big comfort shape! It’s me! It’s me! Here I am!
Big comfort shape puts its arms around me, and it’s the greatest feeling of my life. An addict’s feeling. I cry out again, me, I did that, to make it happen again, more! Even while it’s happening to me I want more. I yell and yell for more. And it gives me more.
Up to a point.
I pulled the crown off my head.
I rubbed the tears from my face.
If I’d stayed a moment longer, I might have wanted to stay forever, and thus harmed the mind I was in, all because I wasn’t used to asking for and getting such divine attention.
Up to a point.
What was that point? Why had I felt that? I didn’t know if I had, really. How was it possible to feel such a sense of love and presence, but also that miniscule seed of the opposite, that feeling of it not being enough or entire? Hadn’t I added that, hadn’t I dreamt it?
I quickly put the crown back on my head. I had a fix now, I could see where particular patterns took me, I could get to—
Oh. Much clearer now. I must be about two years old. I’m walking around an empty room, marching, raising my knees and then lowering them, as if that’s important.
Oh, I can think that. There’s room for that thought in my head. I’m able to internally comment on my own condition. As an adult. As a toddler.
Can I control…? I lower my foot. I stand there, inhabiting my toddler body, aware of it, the smallness of everything. But my fingers feel huge. And awkward. It’s like wearing oven gloves. I don’t want to touch anything. I know I’d break it.
And that would be terrible.
I turn my head. I put my foot forward. It’s not like learning to drive, I already know how all this is done, it’s just slightly different, like driving in America. I can hear…
Words I understand. ‘Merry Christmas!’ From through the door. Oh, the door. The vase with a crack in it. The picture of a Spanish lady that Dad cut off the side of a crate of oranges and put in a frame. The smell of the carpet, close up. Oh, reactions to the smell, lots of memories, associations, piling in.
No! No! I can’t take that! I can’t understand that! I haven’t built those memories yet!
Is this why I’ve always felt such enormous meaningless meaning about those objects and smells? I put it all out of my mind, and try to just be. And it’s okay. It’s okay.
The Christmas tree is enormous. With opened presents at the bottom, and I’m not too interested in those presents, which is weird, they’ve been left there, amongst the wrapping. The wrapping is better. This mind doesn’t have signifiers for wrapping and tree yet, this is just a lot of weird stuff that happens, like all the other weird stuff that happens.
I head through the doorway. Step, step, step.
Into the hall. All sorts of differences from now, all sorts of objects with associations, but no, never mind the fondness and horror around you.
I step carefully into the kitchen.
And I’m looking up at the enormous figure of my mother, who is talking to… who is that? A woman in a headscarf. Auntie someone… oh, she died. I know she died! And I forgot her completely! Because she died!
I can’t stop this little body from starting to shake. I’m going to cry. But I mustn’t!
‘Oh, there she goes again,’ says Mum, a sigh in her voice. ‘It’s Christmas, you mustn’t cry at Christmas.’
‘She wants to know where her daddy is,’ says the dead auntie. ‘He’s down the pub.’
‘Don’t tell her that!’ That sudden fear in her voice. And the wryness that always went along with that fear. As if she was mocking herself for her weakness.
‘She can’t understand yet. Oh, look at that. Is she meant to be walking like that?’ And oh no, Mum’s looking scared at me too. Am I walking like I don’t know how, or like an adult?
Mummy grabs me up into her arms and looks and looks at me, and I try to be a child in response to the fear in her face… but I have a terrible feeling that I look right into those eyes as me. I’m scaring her, like a child possessed!
I took the crown off more slowly that time. And then immediately put it on again. And now I knew I was picking at a scab. Now I knew and I didn’t care. I wanted to know what everything in my mother’s face at that moment meant.
I’m seven and I’m staring at nothing under the tree. I’m up early and I’m waiting. Something must soon appear under the tree. There was nothing in the stocking at the end of my bed, but they/Father Christmas/they/Father Christmas/they might not have known I’d put out a stocking.
I hear the door to my parents’ bedroom opening. I tense up. So much that it hurts. My dad enters the room and sighs to see me there. I bounce on my heels expectantly. I do a little dance that the connections between my muscles and my memory tell me now was programmed into me by a children’s TV show.
He looks at me like I’m some terrible demand. ‘You’re too old for this now,’ he says. And I remember. I remember this from my own memory. I’d forgotten this. I hadn’t forgotten. ‘I’m off down the shops to get you some presents. If I can find any shops that are open. If you’d stayed asleep until you were supposed to, they’d have been waiting for you. Don’t look at me like that. You knew there wasn’t any such thing as Father Christmas.’
He takes his car keys from the table and goes outside in his dressing gown, and drives off in the car, in his dressing gown.
I’m eight, and I’m staring at a huge pile of presents under the tree, things I wanted but have been carefully not saying anything about, things that are far too expensive. Mum and Dad are standing there, and as I walk into the room, eight-year-old walk, trying, no idea how, looking at my mum’s face, which is again scared, just turned scared in the second she saw me… but Dad starts clapping, actually applauding, and then Mum does too.
‘I told you I’d make it up to you,’ says Dad. I don’t remember him telling me. ‘I told you.’ This is too much. This is too much. I don’t know how I’m supposed to react. I don’t know how in this mind or outside of it.