What It’s Like to Recover Lost Memories of Traumatic Events

Reentering the stories that shape us

Trigger warning: this story contains content related to pedophilia that might be troubling to some readers.

I am the kind of tired brought on by the malaise of teenaged boredom and afternoon height of midsummer heat, even though it never really gets that hot in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I live with my mother and brother in an old adobe in the early nineties. I am twelve, have nowhere to go and nothing to do so I lie here, waiting for something to happen.

Like the days I spend hours reading fantasy novels beneath locust trees, images begin to swirl — memories and haphazard wants and dreams, hopes for something I might later call a future, and the more frightening blobs I’ve begun to recognize, recently, as memories. Though only twelve, I’ve already lived in Lagos, Nigeria; Skibbereen, Ireland; Denton, Texas; Mahopac, New York; Tesuque, New Mexico; and now Santa Fe.

Those years held the bitter divorce of my parents between Lagos and Skibbereen, where my mother fled and would later relay to me stories of her madness, something she called post-partum depression, alongside cerebral malaria that plagued her to the point we feared for our safety. We lived in an old farmhouse dubbed, in Gaelic, “Beautiful Fairy Fort,” and my grandmother, a tall, quiet woman of French-German descent, traveled to rescue us. She brought us back to where she and my grandfather lived in Denton, Texas.

My mother has shown my brother and me pictures of these times, moments locked behind screens whose color has faded to the point I wonder if everything looked like that in the seventies, muted and dark, or if perhaps it’s Ireland, and that’s why the words and poetry from that place drip with melancholy and longing. She has shown photographs of us as small children in Nigeria, by streams and with our nanny, who she tells us raised us while she and my Psychologist-father held parties for the likes of Fela Kuti and other musicians and artists of the Lagos arts-renaissance.

These photographs, I realize as I lay in my bed in Santa Fe, are not actual memories, though I have constructed memories around them. There are spaces between the images, too, dark voids that open gaping mouths threatening to consume me whole if I spend too long staring.

We are the survivors that have lived through these stories. We have emerged, and we are still alive.

In these voids, terrible things live, moments where the madness my mother describes took on real form, when she’d run screaming through the house, tearing at her literal hair until blood dotted the tips of her fingers, which she’d show us before screaming more, in the kitchen, where she could break glasses and delicate teacups.

This happened.
This happened.
This happened.

I don’t know why, but right now, in my bed in Santa Fe, I refuse to look away from that blackness, and these words form.

This happened.
This happened.
This happened.

They are like the words I recall feeling as a child, rather than thinking, words that rushed through me, telling me, “I am me, I am me, I am me.” This is a real memory, the moment I saw myself as unique and separate from anyone else. But these new words, this new awareness, is different. The mantra, this happened, hammers at my consciousness, it’s sticky and thick and heavy, but I can’t stop the focus. I have to know more. I have to know all of it, every memory, everything real. The memories of my mother, those that showed me exactly what her madness looked like, what it felt like to witness it at the age of six, or seven, or eight, are real.

I swallow, hard, the saliva acidic against the back of my throat, but don’t open my eyes. I have to go deeper. I have to know. I don’t know why I have to know, but I do. It’s like opening the most important gift or reading until the very end of a book and refusing to skip ahead, no matter how much you want to know the resolution right now. If I look ahead, the images themselves might leave forever, as fleeting as they are, as insubstantial. They are mist, these memories, timeless and horrible, but also as delicate and perfect as the fairies I used to imagine residing unseen in our Beautiful Fairy Fort.

That happened. The recognition of this is electric — like a thousand, a billion tiny pinpricks of light zapping me everywhere, in the most intimate parts. This happened. It was real, substantive, not a dream, this is the life I have lived and haven’t seen. Something’s been pushing at me, gentle and insidious, covering these memories with black blankets, placing a finger to its lips, and emitting a hushhhhhhh like wind across a thousand miles of tall grass, which in turn sways away from me, further clouding my senses with the rustle and reddish light beating across the tips.

This happened, and what else? What else has some tiny gnome in my mind been covering up? Why is it I have always walked forward, and never thought to look back, to wonder about the source of this pain I carry with me all the time? The source is in that blackness, I know it. It’s in memories I have to keep probing, or I will become like her, like my mother, and scream endlessly and futilely into that void, shatter glass, and threaten suicide and death to my children because I can’t see because I refuse to look.

This happened.
This happened.
This happened.

It wasn’t that long ago, really, when something beyond terrible happened.

I see the bike lying against a garage door in the hot Texas sun. It’s my best friend’s house, Jennifer. Her hair is dark like mine, but her eyes are brown instead of blue, cheeks round and red. We are five, or six, or seven. I push aside the thought of age, of that kind of specificity. I know, somehow, I will never grasp that. Instead, I see Jennifer and her tall brother, an adult, in her kitchen in the house next to ours in Denton.

All of this happened. Jennifer was a real girl, I recall pictures of her from our albums, and her brother is too crisp in my mind, his words so precise, almost categorical.

“If you do it,” he says, “you guys can have an ice cream bar.”

We don’t have desserts in my house, not really, my mother always insisting on healthy food, so this is tempting. Not tempting enough to go through with what he’s asking, though. I don’t know how I know what he’s asking for, but I know it’s a horrible thing, the worst kind of horrible thing.

His face drops and Jennifer shoots me a glance.

This happened.

“Okay then, how about a sleepover?” He brightens.

I’ve never had a sleepover. My child-belly does flip-flops and it’s like I’ve been offered the actual moon, a space journey with astronauts and maybe fairies. Jennifer’s face looks scared, but she wants this, too. We could play all night and I could sleep in a bag beneath her bed.

I agree and Jennifer’s brother claps his hands as if he were the child. Then, he takes me into the bathroom where he removes my overalls, pulls his pants down, places Vaseline on his hands, and begins to rub.

This happened.

In Santa Fe, I cannot believe what I am re-seeing, what I am re-experiencing.

It is horrible, but elating, shocking in the life it brings. I’m alive. This numbness I carry all the time, in my fingers and toes, begins to dissipate. The room spins as the images pummel me. I feel sick, stand up, and go to the bathroom where I lean over the toilet and vomit. The images don’t stop, they are a barrage, like the finale of a fireworks show, exploding with color and texture and sound and they are too much.

And they are not enough. They continue to flood me.

They flood me with what happened next, with the unthinkable, and they flood me with Jennifer’s soft voice from the other side of the bathroom door, asking when we would be finished. Her brother whispers to tell her that he’s helping me pull up my pants. I obey. She asks again, more insistent, telling him mom and dad will be home soon, and he is angry, but listens. He lets me go and I re-join Jennifer, scared and confused and this has happened before.

The strangest part of this is the memory within this new memory — this concrete knowledge this is not the first time he has done this. But that one, or those, the deeper ones, are in a box so old and locked so tightly, I’m not sure there ever was a key.

Jennifer and I go to her room, back to playing with Barbies. Her room is messier than mine because there are toys everywhere. We are less engaged now, quieter, both of us carrying this sick, heavy thing we don’t understand. Finally, she looks up. “What did he do?” she asks.

I lean in a little. I’m telling her a secret. “It,” I whisper.

Her lids fall and her cheeks redden. I think she is crying. “He shouldn’t do it,” she whispers back. Then, red eyes meet mine one last time. “He does it to me, too.”

The thing about repressed memory is that you are not whole without these horrible things that are a part of you.

You carry them with you, but they are shaded and hidden and still so terribly heavy. You are not free of them, they control every aspect of you on some deep, profound level. They are fear and pain and self-destruction, self-loathing and chaos because you cannot see them, but they see the deepest, most private parts of you. They control you, it seems, like an android instructed by some outside, malevolent force. You are not you, you are never you, you can’t be you, because you are not whole. These pieces are black holes, and eventually consume other parts of you, parts that would otherwise help you understand yourself.

Profound trauma causes this, and those who have experienced it have to either carry around this blackness, this absence, or let it resurface and see it too clearly, allow the core of ourselves to be pummeled by it because this happened, and when we reenter memory, we reenter what we have actually experienced.

Doing so means asking awful questions, like “why did I let this happen?” It means feeling flawed, broken, dirty, soiled. Reentry into memory means confronting things we sometimes mistake as who we are, fundamentally, rather than what we have experienced. We cannot separate these things until we see these memories as clearly as the lines in our palms.

Reentry into memory also means we can separate two truths. We can begin the arduous process of recognizing we can be whole, alive, aware, functioning while still seeing our experiences as part of our lives. These experiences, these horrible traumas, are not us, but our memories, our stories. They are in the past. Reentry into memory allows us to see this, see our stories, and understand they are what we have been through, but we are much more than the stories that shape us.

We are the survivors that have lived through these stories. We have emerged, and we are still alive.