Not quite often but sometimes, certain memories from my childhood come to my mind. They don’t come in a way memories usually come, they are not just me remembering something exactly the way it was then, they come with a new understanding of the past memory or with another part of that same memory that I thought I forgot. Like a regular memory with an extra layer. Today was one of the days they came to me.

I remember the first time ever I started noticing how people actually look like. I was 5 years old. I was sitting outside the house with my uncle, it was a summer day, we were eating ice cream and telling jokes. Suddenly, I realized that I have never actually took a proper look at his face. I knew he had round face, beard, glasses, and brown hair. I only knew its shapes and some of the colors, not the features, not the details. As I realized this, I instantly started seeing it all, one by one. I felt like I was living with my eyes closed and now suddenly I remembered I can open them and see. Like in a dream when you suddenly realize you can just wake up and then you wake up. First I saw that there was a large space between his two eyes, then I saw his nose was sweaty and smooth, then I saw every hair of his bear had its own direction of growing, then I saw his skin was somewhere red, somewhere yellow, somewhere pink, somewhere it was almost without any color, it was just weird. Then I saw many more things and I thought to myself oh wow this is so much fun. This is what I’m gonna be doing from now on, just noticing how everything looks like, how it really looks like. I was happy and amazed. I wondered if other people also see details or just shapes, I wanted to ask them but I didn’t know how to ask this, how to say it. I didn’t know how to say many things that I wanted to say. Once I asked my mum how can I do this, how can I learn how to say everything that I’m thinking. She told me I must read many books and that is how I will learn. I was so relieved to hear that there is a way to learn this because at times I had a feeling that it was just impossible.

I remember waking up one day on a bed in my grandparents house and thinking what if someday I wake up, and I wake up as a small baby, a baby so small it doesn't yet know how to talk or walk, and then as I baby I realize that everything that happened until this morning was just a dream? That I am just a baby that had a dream of having a life, a dream that ended at this point? I stayed laying on the bed for a while trying to remember the first time I realized I was alive. Trying to remember the first memory ever. I would go remembering yesterday, and then day before yesterday, and then day before that, and so on until I couldn't remember anything that happened to me before that thing that I could remember happening. I couldn’t remember the first memory, it didn't matter that much because I didn't really care about remembering it, I just enjoyed the trying to remember because it was a weird thing to do with my mind, weird and fun, it was as if I was trying to reach something that is different than anything I could ever imagine reaching, it was like traveling to a new place, like going somewhere all by my own, traveling to a place where I know I exist but I cannot see myself in. This became one of my favorite things to do before I go to sleep, trying to remember when I first started.

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