Creative Writing - Short Story #2

Because I like the idea of posting my work in Creative Writing on here for all to see, I figured I'd throw this up next - another short non-fiction story in the same vein as my Notre Dame story from a while back. It's a little more personal than that one, but the subject matter is something I've been ruminating on for a while now and I couldn't resist the opportunity to get it down on paper. I hope it's to your satisfaction. 

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Jacob Biggs

My Mind

            When I was young, my books taught me that time moved in a line – a timeline, as they say. You walk to the right, then look back to the left where everything that’s come before has been organized in a linear fashion. I never thought too hard about it, because it never seemed important. But recently I came to a realization – one that still isn't important but which is much more apt.

            My mind isn't a timeline. It's not a line in the ground that I can walk down, look back and see my life behind me in neat, reverse chronological order.

            Instead, I'm standing next to it, looking at its side. And it’s not a line but a brick wall.

            My memories are all graffiti drawings. They're painted on the side of the wall – the side I can see – in shapes and colors of varying size, vividness, and the like. Every new memory adds a new drawing. The basest drawings in this wall are of the important things I learned while I was young – like how to ride a bike, how to spell and talk and read, manners, and my name and the names of people in my family. These memories are me. Without all of these base memories (or core memories, to use a term from Inside Out), I wouldn't function properly, and all of the other memories painted over them would flake off without a base to keep them on the wall. Sometimes a more recent memory sinks into the back and joins these core memories, but this is uncommon; most of these painted memories remain on the front layer.

            But this wall has been a canvas for two decades now, and it’s gotten cluttered, and so the drawings all overlap and replace each other. As one drawing gets smothered by other, newer drawings, it becomes harder for me to recall it. Sometimes, however, a bit of the original drawing manages to show through the new – like an older coat of paint under a new, different hue. Annoyingly, these lingering drawings tend to be ones that I'd rather keep buried – particularly ones where I screw up and get into trouble. New memories are never not being painted, to the effect that what should be a static piece of art is more like a film – always in motion without a second of stillness.

            Also, like I mentioned earlier, these drawings are all very different, not just in design but in longevity. I have certain memories that start to fade almost as soon as they've happened, and some that are almost entirely gone, like most of what I've learned in Chinese class (dui bu qi, Yuan Lao Shi he Jiang Lao Shi. I did my best). Others tend to be much more long-lasting (such as jokes from various TV shows, that Backstreet Boys song I've had off and on in my head for the past two months or so, the names of every Cybertronian character in Transformers: Prime – I could keep going). I can never know, when I'm in the middle of gaining a memory, whether it will be longer-lasting or disappear sooner. Only by looking back later can I figure that out.

            Also, because I'm standing away from the wall, and it's going away from me in both directions, my perception of time is a little jumbled when it comes to the past – even the recent past. I can tell with relative ease when something happened, whether it came before or after something else, but that doesn't play a huge role in my thought process; it's more relevant that it did happen, rather than when. The details tend to be rather foggy upon recollection, as well. There are days when I can’t even remember what I had for lunch a few hours after the event.

            All of this adds up to a living and constantly evolving painting – arguably more an organism than a work of art – that somehow embodies me as a whole, the entirety of which I'm never allowed to see because it stretches on so far and because much of it is buried under other aspects of me that are always being added on.

            That's probably for the best, though. I have a feeling that I'd lose my mind if I ever saw the whole thing at once. I can be satisfied with only a partial snapshot, as long as I get some say in what comprises it.