Memoria
A common coping mechanism within psychology states that a traumatic event in one’s childhood can easily explain its almost complete erasure from a person’s mind. I watch from the outside as my sister describes how we would pretend to own a store and sell our plastic fruit to our stuffed animals when we were little. I smile and pretend to remember whenever my mother laughs about the numerous times I would come running into the house with both knees bloody from falling off the skateboard. I never tell them that these memories are their own and that they use them to connect with me as profoundly as they can. However, they hold no space in my mind. I cannot find them. I search for the events in my childhood that have allowed me to learn and, in turn, shape who I am, but I cannot pinpoint them. I worry that I am not a whole person.
As I obsessively record every moment that means something, I almost feel like I can relax, knowing that I won’t lose how I felt or how it affected me. As I return to my childhood home and the field that held my innocent expeditions, I almost feel like I can see the ghostly images from my past. I try to be present; I try to think hard. Clinging to my sister’s memories, I feel that I can reclaim my own. So, I listen to her when she shares, and I create my memories through her story, which I then translate into a photographic image. I analyze how her memories have shaped her into the woman she is today and how it informs her relationship with us, her family. I capture the passing interiors of our lives, how my father calmly stops my mother from nervously tearing the skin off her fingers, how my sister fluctuates her personality between masculine and feminine, and where all of this leaves me. The use of my family’s text and the images that I create give forms to the ghosts in my mind. I start to feel like I have a past again.
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