I remember: My first kiss. His name. What he looked like. Where he was from. Which room we were in. The occasion. What grade I was in. How great it felt.
I don’t remember: The date. The city. The address. What I was wearing. What he was wearing. Who else was there. What the room looked like. Whose house it was.
I remember: Classmates who teased me. Boys in my neighborhood who bullied me. Their names. Where they lived/got on the school bus. Things they said. Things they did. Some locations. How scared I was. How hurt I was.
I don’t remember: Exact dates. Some locations.
I remember: The Israeli who thought I couldn’t understand, telling his friends in front of me that “she has beautiful eyes – but her face?” Their laughter. The look that flashed between us when our eyes met and he realized that I’d understood. Where we were. The month and year. The reason I was there in the first place. How his comment and their laughter made me feel, both at the time and for a long time after that.
I don’t remember: His name. Precisely what he looked like (though I do remember that he wore a kipah/yarmulke). The exact date.
I remember: My first time. His name. What he looked like. What a great guy he was. The location. The city. The season. The year. Some of the things he said. Some of the things I said. Moments of shared humor and laughter. How it felt.
I don’t remember: The exact date. His address. What his apartment looked like. What else we did that day.
I remember: The much older boy/teenager who offered me a quarter (25 cents) to enter a wooded area behind my home. The precise location where he made the offer. How I sensed that going with him would be wrong. Telling him I needed to ask my mother first – and him trying to convince me otherwise. I didn’t go.
I don’t remember: What he looked like. The date. How old I was (but definitely under 10 years old).
I remember: The boy down the street who was a year ahead of me in school, who wouldn’t let me leave his front yard until I pulled my pants down. His name. What he looked like. His driveway. The color of his house and where on my street it was. What he made me do. How it made me feel. His father’s profession. Hearing many years later that he had died – and not being terribly upset to hear the news.
I don’t remember: The date (sometime during elementary school). His home address.
I remember: The acquaintance who worked in a record store I frequented in Jerusalem, who suddenly reached out from behind the counter to touch my breast, grinned, and continued to talk as though nothing had happened. His first name (I never knew his last name). What he looked like. Where the store was. The size of the store. How shocked I was by what he’d done. I didn’t do anything about it or even acknowledge that it happened.
I don’t remember: The date. The year. The time of year.
And the list goes on and on. Decades of moments and feelings remembered, captured and holding space in a tapestry woven with memories and life experiences. I remember the birth dates of my sons – the 14-year-old stretched lazily across the sofa next to me as well as the one who only survived for six-and-a-half months, twenty years ago. I do not remember the exact dates when we lost our other three pregnancies. I can describe each one in detail – the procedures, where they took place, how I felt (both physically and emotionally), what I said, what others said, how much it hurt (both physically and emotionally), how I cried… I do not remember the dates (sometimes I even get the years mixed up), details about my surroundings or what the doctors and nurses looked like, though I do remember the names and faces of so many of the doctors and nurses who cared for our first son twenty years ago as well as their random acts of kindness towards us – including the one who hugged me as I cried uncontrollably just outside the hospital’s main doors shortly after our son died.
Not remembering certain details doesn’t make experiences any less horrible (or wonderful!) or any less real, and some of us are better at remembering dates and surroundings than others. Choosing not to share them doesn’t make them any less real either (I’ve written about experiences here that I’ve never shared with anyone). I find it kind of terrifying to think that our credibility in recalling impactful moments in our lives depends more on whether we can pinpoint specific dates and addresses than on whether we can recall what we did or what was done to us – with or without our consent.
