As soon as I was past the threshold of the doorway, I was already in a new memory. I was sitting in the front seat of a truck, a heavy-duty 18 wheeler. A younger version of me was sitting to my side, buckled into a car seat. He was singing something I couldn't place, a song about goodbyes and good nights. He had a lisp, owing to a lack of front teeth, and when you took that together with his bowl-cut hair, he was kind of ugly. Ugly cute, though.

Outside, it was storming. The truck was parked at a pizza place, and Little Me was sitting alone, waiting for someone to return from inside. When I looked out into the rain I saw an older, bigger man running towards the truck. The streaks of water blurred and distorted him, but I could tell he was hunched over, with a coat pulled up to shield him from the rain. He was carrying a pizza in his arms, trying to keep the box from getting soaked.

"Pawpaw!" Little Me squealed when the man was safely in the truck. I moved up out of the seat to give him space, depositing myself into a bed in the back and watching. The man wore a green t-shirt, with a pack of Marlboro cigarettes tucked into a chest pocket. His hair was grey and balding, with a short beard. "Pizzaaa!" Little Me yelled, grabbing at the air with his fingers, impatient. It was at this point, with slight consternation, I realized I was hungry. This was a dream. I shouldn't be hungry.

"We sure got a good one, knobbergnawber." What the fuck was a knobbergnawber? Was I a knobbergnawber? "Let's get back," my Pawpaw said, starting the truck, turning the dials to the radio.

The drive carried us over a mountain, the road arcing up ever higher until we were overlooking the city we had driven in from. I watched my younger self start to fall asleep. He was staring out the window, over the mountain to the city below- little lights gleamed in the distance, like stars fallen to earth.

"Pawpaw?"

"What is it?"

"Looks like a carnival."

"Sure does. You ain't fallin asleep on me, are you?"

"Nuh-uh." But Little Me was lying. I knew because everything was fading, slipping apart and getting fuzzy. Static started to buzz in my ears as the scene grew grainy and distorted. And then it was gone.

***

Now I was standing in a doorway that was missing a door, looking into a bedroom. A shirtless man was laying on the bed, smoking a cigarette. He had a sun tattooed around his navel, with the word 'HARD' surrounding it in a gothic font. He lifted his arm to take a drag and I noticed that he also had a spider web tattoo on his right elbow. A Rottweiler jutted from his ribs, and it and the spider web were both a dirty green color. Brighter, more vivid colors popped from his abdomen, as a praying mantis ripped itself out of his skin, leaving a streak of red tattoo ink flowing down. On the other side of the room was my Pawpaw, resting in an armchair. Little Me was sitting on the floor in front of him, his back resting against Pawpaw's legs. He was probably no older than three or four. They were all watching a TV that had been placed on a clothing dresser; it was a tiny thing, small enough to carry in one hand. I wondered if staring at that small screen might have given me eyesight issues. I slapped my hand to my face- no glasses. Guess I was in the clear. On the wall beside Pawpaw was a collection of family photos: there was a naked baby me laughing in a sink full of water, a really grainy picture of a skinny teenager holding a fish in the dark, and a man wearing a navy uniform with a serious look on his face.

I guessed that the man in the bed was my dad. I backed a step out of the doorway and took a look around. The bulk of the house seemed to be a single hallway that connected most of the rooms together. On one end, a rug had been taken and hung from the top of a door frame, nailed in to keep it in place. It made a makeshift curtain, and staring at it gave me an urge to cocoon myself within the fabric. I fought it. Turning around, I saw the other end of the hallway terminated in a gas heater and three doorways to the sides. There was also a hot water heater jutting from the wall, just kind of there, ugly and loud. An old woman emerged from one of the side doors.

"Dinner's done!" she called, disappearing back into the room she had come from. Everyone else came out from the bedroom, and I followed them into a kitchen. As I walked, I noticed the floor was all rough and uneven plywood, with cheap plastic flooring cut up to conceal it. Parts of the plywood jutted out from below the flooring, and some of them sank down as I stepped. 

In the kitchen, a big cook-pot of spaghetti was bubbling on top of a stove, with a bowl of buttered noodles beside it. My Pawpaw took two plates: one for him, and one for Little Me, who was yelling out 'sgetti!' over and over. I shook my head. Maybe I would keep parts of this to myself and away from Alexandria. I wonder what kind of house she grew up in? This was... well, it was really sort of a dump. When I got older, would I be ashamed of growing up here? Were these feelings I had now residue from how I had felt before? Was I proud of coming from so little? Did I hide all this, or acknowledge it?

The family was sitting together, eating at the kitchen table. Little Me got his own chair, which he had to stand on to be able to reach the table top. I could feel the pride he had, getting to eat with the rest of the family, and it was embarrassing. But... nice, too. And that feeling of pride was what I was left with when the memory ended.

***

"Life's tough, get a helmet," a voice said from behind me, and when I turned I was in a new scene, a new house. The 'me' of my memories was maybe six now. A girl who looked like she was about a year or two older than him slammed her palm into his forehead, and he fell back onto the floor from the force. The girl plopped herself down on a chair in front of him.

"That's not fair," he said, climbing back to his feet.

"That's the whole point."

"But I was sitting there first!"

"And then you got up and I took it."

"Why are you being so mean?" Little Me demanded.

"If you have to ask, you'll never know, bubba."

"I'm gonna tell on you."

"Mama's just gonna tell you to stop tattle-taling. You can't always run off to grown-ups to fix your problems. You have to learn to take care of yourself, Lee." Then Little Me ran off anyway. Narc.

I took the chance to get a look around. This place was much better off- the floors weren't sinking, and the corners of the ceilings were cobweb-free. It was smaller, though. Had we moved? Or maybe my parents were separated? There was a couch and armchair, with a bigger TV that took up almost an entire wall. The living room linked to a kitchen that doubled as a dining room, separated by a counter-top, and that was where Little Me was tattling on my assumed sister. My mom was sitting at a table and talking to someone else, but I couldn't hear what either of them were saying. Their mouths moved, but all I heard was the sound of the TV in the living room, no matter how hard I tried to focus. Maybe it was because Little Me wasn't paying attention, because the other person with my mom was also blurred, barely more than a flesh-colored silhouette in the haze of my childhood memories. I guess it would be weird if my memories were a perfect recreation, even the parts I hadn't noticed when I was living them. A radio, perched on a kitchen window sill, was playing a song, but all I could feel was the echo of the notes, the effect it had as it reverberated through the house. It was putting Little Me to sleep, and making me drowsy as a consequence.

"Mom, Dani is being mean. She stole my seat and then she hit me in the head."

"You need to go to sleep soon anyway, son. And stop being a tattletale."

Little Me went back into the living room, head down and sulking. My sister laughed and said 'I told you so'. He muttered something, tired and irritated, then went to a big pile of blankets that had been thrown on the floor. There were no pillows, so he made his own from one of the covers. All the lights were off, the room a shade of deep blue that emanated from the TV.

"Love you, bubba," my sister said, stretching out on the armchair she had taken from Little Me, a blanket of her own now draped across her.

"Love you too, sissy," Little Me said, yawning, tired and grumpy. His voice was so... weak. I noticed for the first time just how small he seemed. My own knees were getting weak.

It felt

really weird

thinking of that girl as my sister

***

There were whispers now. The world was still dark, so I started stumbling blindly in that darkness towards the whispers. Then, like a curtain being thrown aside, it was all blistering light.

I was outside, in the heat of summer. Four kids stood in front of me, my sister included in them. A quick glance to the side revealed Little Me as well, a little ways off, watching everyone. They were all older, bigger. Little Me looked nervous, like he was standing before a court hearing. The kids in front were in a circle, heads leaning together, conspiring, occasionally looking out towards Little Me. Just as Little Me seemed close to giving up and turning around, the circle stood and my sister came forward.

"Okay, Lee. You can hide this time, and Brandon is gonna be it." Little Me jumped in the air, excitement brimming over on his face. Dani knew how to cheat when they were picking who was 'it' in hide and seek, and she always forced me to do it when she let me play at all. I was unsure why I knew this now, suddenly, but it was there in my head now.

Dani. Short for Danielle. My sister. I saw her chuckling with one of the other kids, and I tried to force everything I knew about her to come back to me. But there was just... a gap. A gap that sometimes randomly had spots filling in, like how I suddenly knew she was exactly two years and two months older than me, like that knowledge was always right there for me to pull up.

"You guys won't ever find me," Little Me said, and I had a vague premonition of where this was going, amnesia or not. Be careful what you wish for, Little Me. The Brandon guy started counting, and Little Me took off running along with Dani and the last kid. I followed my younger self down a wooded trail, a barbed wire fence running parallel with the way we were going. Apparently my mom's place was surrounded by land, and the back half of it seemed like a pasture. The perfect place for children to get into trouble.

Little Me had settled in at the end of the little nature trail he had been following, surrounded by bushes. It was like a small hideaway, blocked on one side by the fence, on the other by a wall of trees. He was laying on the ground, staring up at clouds that sleepily meandered across the sky.

This had been my very own secret spot. I could remember my sister digging in the dirt here while I hung from a tree, both of us talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up: her, an archaeologist; me, a writer. I used to carry books here to read in the summer haze. They say when you're young everything seemed bigger, and I could verify that firsthand right now. This holy, secret place now seemed small and cramped and tight. I sighed and joined Little Me on the ground, wondering how long we'd be here before he decided to go looking for the others.

The sky was so blue. "But there was no God," I said, without really knowing why. It just came out, like it was something I'd always say in response to thinking that the sky was blue. I wonder if Alexandria's memories were anything like this, whether or not we had anything in common. I was getting the impression my older sister was kind of an asshole, which made me want to know if Alexandria had any siblings. Would we have to go through each and every moment of our life? Living through it all a second time before we could leave? Or, well... Wake up? Something told me that wasn't the case. It was more like we were getting pieces, and then other memories were being filled in around those pieces. Like how I could remember running from this spot to a great willow tree past the field; my sister would climb the branches while I sat at the roots and stared at her in awe.

Was there a reason for the things we were seeing then? Were they formative? Was I supposed to be taking something away from this time in my life?

I looked at my younger self. He was short and skinny, borderline emaciated. He looked dirty, too. His forehead was furrowed and he kept pulling up tufts of grass from the earth, letting the blades fall silently back down.

"What kind of life do we have?" I asked him, but he kept his secrets. So we just sat there. I was still hungry, and the sight of blackberries growing on bushes along the trail was making the hunger eat at my focus. I tried to pick them... and my hand passed straight through. Guess it wasn't that easy. I sank back to the ground, watching nothing, waiting, wondering why I didn't just pass through the earth itself. 

"Hey. Hugh, or Mu, if either of you can hear me... I'm kind of hungry. This trip is great and all but I could use like, a snack. Maybe some trail mix and a soda?" The world was quiet, and then Little Me kicked himself to his feet, stomping at some more of the grass, and started to make his way back towards his house. I followed after him. The kid looked pissed. I didn't blame him, though. We had been totally, one-hundred-percent abandoned as soon as the game of hide-and-seek started.

We found my sister and her friends behind the house, right where we had first left them. I saw that the one named Brandon was over the fence, approaching a horse. "Why didn't you guys look for me?" Little Me asked, pouting, putting his hands on his hips and huffing.

"Bubba! We did. We tried for a while but then gave up. That means you win. Isn't that great?"

"I don't believe you," Little Me said. I saw Brandon pick up a stalk of wheat and start to tickle the horse.

"It's true. We were about to get mama to help look for you." The two friends behind Dani made noises of agreement. In the field, the horse kicked Brandon hard enough to knock him to the ground. "Oh shit!" My sister yelled, running to the fence. "Brandon! Are you okay?" From a good bit away, I could hear Brandon loudly moan in pain. The rest of her friends followed after Dani, while Little Me stood there, confused about what to do. He spun around in different directions, but there was nothing to see, just a black darkness covering everything but he and I. Then I blinked and even he was gone.