Childhood's Lost Saints

On remembrance and witnesses

I dream quite a lot and often, I try to remember my dreams. I used to write them down in a diary, now I sometimes text someone about it. I don’t subject my dreams to psychoanalysis. I don’t understand psychoanalysis and I like to keep at least one part of my life away from the hyper-scrutiny I often subject myself to. These dreams are often amusing ones, bordering on the absurd. Sometimes they are terrifying, pushing me to seek comfort in deeper layers of my blanket.

I woke up from an afternoon nap, in that odd space of terror and confusion that one finds themselves after a dream. It was not a conventional nightmare by any means. There were no deaths, no cliffs to fall off from, no seas in which I’d drowned. It was a dream in which I was on the terrace of my old home. I could recognise the orange brick tiles that I loved so well. I remember seeing a toy in my dream, a small fish or a dolphin, brown and blue in colour, tuck-tucking its way in a small pool of water, possibly in a bucket or a tub.

I have not seen the toy in years, I’m not even sure if my mother threw it away and if she did, when. I didn’t even play much with this toy. I never quite attached a lot of emotional value to toys or dolls, except perhaps the occasional Barbie doll. But this dream seemed to have opened the door to some back alley of my memory, triggering some strange fear, some obscure sadness. I crawled to my parents’ room, and asked my mother, did I have a toy like that? Or was I making it up? No, I did have a toy like a mechanical dolphin. I also had a ship. That makes me sad, I said. I don’t like admitting to my parents that I feel sad, quite often actually. My mother asked why. I’m sad that I’m not that child playing with those toys anymore. My mother laughed in that half-amused, half-concerned way she does when talking to me sometimes.

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A professor once quoted another scholar, the past is a foreign country. I think about that often. Would that mean that the past is also a foreign person, a stranger whom I do not recognise? It surely feels that way. I have never seen myself in pictures of myself — taken in father’s old Canon camera, in washed off colours with people who are now shrivelled or dead — with anything but a tinge of sadness. This kid smiling, giggling, is another person. The country that she inhabits is one without grief. It speaks in a language that does not have a word for pain.

I’ve been thinking of what it is to be remembered, of what it means to not be remembered. Of course, pop culture and Linkedin bros will tell us that we should live for ourselves and not be concerned about external validation. True, true. Except that if our lives mean anything at all, if it isn’t entirely transient, then we ought to be remembered. We must have witness to our lives, as the quote goes. But I barely remember anything about my childhood. The only real witnesses to it - my parents - may not remember it a few decades from now. The old country slips away fast. Its language remains incoherent to me.

I nod along to Le Guin’s Leaves:

Years do odd things to identity.

What does it mean to say

I am that child in the photograph

at Kishamish in 1935?

Might as well say I am the shadow

of a leaf of the acacia tree

felled seventy years ago

moving on the page the child reads.

Might as well say I am the words she read

or the words I wrote in other years,

flicker of shade and sunlight

as the wind moves through the leaves.

I think about an old friend who knew me since I was about 6 years old. We bumped into each other — your 20s I know I realise, is the age when you’re old enough to ‘bump into an old friend.’ We made polite conversation, how is work, how is college, how are your parents, all good? She ended the conversation gently, nice meeting you bro. I felt a strange jab at my chest. Here she was, a witness to my childhood obsessions and teenage deliriums of blue uniforms and oiled double-plaits, greeting me like a stranger. I don’t blame her. If it takes two to tango, it takes two to grow apart too. What we don’t always realise is that as we turn stranger to someone else, we turn strangers to ourselves, to that child who does not play with toys anymore.