Threads of Continuity
Revisiting the boundary between memory, illusion, and a life left behind.
I found the videos.
My life is now linked to a past from which I had to abruptly break. For a while, it seemed like that life, memorialized in those videos, was a mirage. The great astrological age of Rahu, an illusion. But I had lived it. I was bestowed with a blessing from that age, so how could it be nothing?
When you move to a different country, you carry memories of your home. Maybe some pictures and videos. An ache of homesickness to go along with it all. It’s one thing to grieve the life of your childhood that you no longer have access to. It’s quite another to lose access to the sounds and motions of your baby from when they were an infant, growing into toddlerhood. Especially in the time of mobile phones and recording videos on a whim.
When I journeyed the seven seas to gain an education, the ache of my childhood home never really left me, kind of like the Morgul-wound that followed Frodo the rest of his life. The pain was strong but the balm was there too. I had digitized some photos so they were available to me away from home. My mom sent me some when I asked for this specific photo or that.
Years later, uprooting my life to seek safety was an entirely different proposition in how the sudden disruption broke my spirit. While trying to preserve as much of my old-new life as I could, losing my stash of a couple thousand videos of my baby to a notoriously infamous export process on iPhones broke my heart.
I roamed around like Arwen in her father’s imagining of her fate when mortality claimed Aragorn — lifeless, mourning, zombie-like. The only thing she and I had were memories. I don’t think Arwen, had that alternate reality come to pass, would have to questioned whether her time with Aragorn was real. As for me? All I had were the clothes on our backs, packed baby clothes (not mine, there wasn’t enough space in the suitcases) and an acorn treehouse toy I snatched from our old life just as that portal of a life well-lived, well-loved and built from my dreams, closed.
My maternal grandmother had to flee her home to save her life. She couldn’t bring with her any of her belongings. Her home, a turreted fortress, had riches she was born to. In her recounting of her flight to safety, she told us how she had hurriedly filled a chest with family heirlooms. That chest had been hidden in a hole in the ground. Her intent was to return to her place of birth with her new husband after the chaos of Police Action died down to retrieve it.
That trip back never happened.
All she had were stories and memories and recollections. One lone photo of one small part of the fortress with guards posing in two neat rows. She would show us that photo, describing their uniforms and the ‘chapras’, an emblem of sorts, that they sported on their belts. It was inscribed with the names of the fortress owners.
My grandmother descended into wistfulness every time she narrated stories of her old home. Each time memories of new motherhood or the pride of becoming a first-time homeowner tried to visit me, a kind of listlessness overtook me.
Being displaced is one of the hardest things one can endure.
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My dad also relocated in his youth. He was born and raised in one place but settled as a youth in another, when his family moved. I don’t think he even had the luxury of one lone photo to remember his old life by. Stoicism came easier to him. We never heard him talk of his childhood. I heard a handful of stories from his siblings. Needing to tend to livestock while also dutifully studying. Traveling great distances by foot or bullock-cart to reach his educational institution.
All three of us had for evidence our fickle memories of a life we loved and left behind.
Until I found most of the videos of my old life in my mom’s phone storage.
It’s real!
Even though I was in an astrological period defined as illusory, my life wasn’t just a will-o’-the-wisp that flitted by. My daughter, the love and light of my life, from that fantastical time is very, very real. I replay a video of her at 9 months, sitting on the tan carpet of our home, dressed in a comfortable, long-sleeved 9-month old onesie with soft pants covering her chunky little legs. She’s smushing her banana, in her Baby Bjorn plate, with endless glee. Smush and taste, smush and taste, rubbing those little hands against her mouth because those little uncoordinated baby movements don’t yet look like raising your hand to your mouth to eat.
This baby?
How did I get so lucky to be blessed with her?
The Almighty thought I was worthy of having this North Star in my life?
Look at her! Naughty delight, curious exploration!
And it’s all real.
That break in the chain is now fixed.
I lived it! I can watch my little girl shrieking in delight as she splashes water around playfully from her little toy tub. It’s magical to experience firsts with infants and toddlers, surreal to relive seconds.
I’m not sure why I needed more than my own memories to validate my lived experience for myself. I don’t want to look for answers at this point. I just want to be and enjoy. Abba exhorts me to “don’t go wasting your emotion…”, their song giving way to Bee Gees’ “aah aaah aaah aaaah stayin’ alive” in unexpected therapeutic advice.
Parents universally bemoan the passage of time. How quickly our wards grow up! Here I am, given a second chance to cherish something I thought was lost to technology’s black hole forever.
Planned moves are easier on the soul, if only slightly. The abrupt ones leave a whole part of you dead. I can, and did, write about the sadness of leaving home to build your life elsewhere. But the grief of losing a part of your history is something I’m learning to wrangle with in thought and emotion.
