Maps

"Psychologists say that the memory is inexact, that we recall screen memories, by which they mean that the mind is a filter on which the youth collects, by which they mean that the story of one's life is an aggregate of shards." --Julie Checkoway, page 321 of Writing Creative Nonfiction

I've heard about the fourth dimension, the idea that maybe we can only perceive time as linear, when maybe it has no order. Maybe everything happens at once, and if we could see ourselves in the fourth dimension, we would see a long line of our different selves snaking out behind us at each different moment in our lives. That's how I think of memory; it's a chaotic semblance of our lives, maybe even a glimpse at the fourth dimension. I don't remember years or months really, just the moments, maybe what I was wearing or what someone said; I don't remember things as a linear, chronological story. Our minds are a big tangle of nerves and thoughts and impulses. They aren't machines that record facts, they record only our own experiences. And that's how a person's life is; it is a collection of shards, of little pieces of time that our minds have recorded.