Our Childhoods

“We remember our childhoods not as smooth time lines but as a series of shocks. Memory is an opaque, cracked mirror; or, rather, memories are like timeless seashells scattered over a beach of oblivion. I know that lots of things happened in those years, but trying to remember them is as futile as trying to remember a dream, a dream that leaves behind it a feeling without images, like a scene without a story, an emptiness, just a vague mood. The images are lost. The years, the words, the games, the caresses, have faded, but then, suddenly, as one goes back over the past, something lights up again in a dark forgotten region. For me it’s nearly always a sensation of embarrassment mixed with happiness, and my father’s face is nearly always there, right up close to mine like the shadow that follows us, or that we ourselves follow.”

—Héctor Abad, Oblivion: A Memoir