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Last night was such a pleasant evening, *until about midnight.* 

Just as I got ready to turn in for the night, I heard @smallsteps whimper softly and went to check on her and she was burning up. Every time something like this happens the memories of her having seizures and getting rushed to hospital come flooding back - perhaps the most emotional time of my life, yet also among the numbest. 

Last night, her temperature hit 40 degrees (104), but at least this time, she was responsive, so I got my wife up to give her some medicine for her fever while I got grabbed her portable bath from the basement and filled it with cool water - as she had started vomiting, likely a response to the temperature. She wasn't happy in the cold water, but she also didn't put up much of a fight as I calmly told her a story of when I was little with a fever.

It is my earliest memory. 

![OI000205 1.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/NrSa3Uha-OI000205201.jpg)

I remember being taken in the middle of the night by my mother, my father in tow and I remember the panicked look of concern on her face as she carried me up the long hallway to the bathroom. I remember the brick-red and charcoal of the tiles in the bathroom and the white walls, her words as she orders my father to fill the bath and then her climbing into the tub with her nightie still on, splashing the water over me to try and cool me down. I don't remember crying, I remember being calm, but I also remember this from a birds-eye view as if I am floating above the scene in a movie.  

I recounted this scene to my mother before I came to Finland and she was quiet for a time and then said, *you can't possibly remember that, but I don't remember ever speaking about it with you. You were no more than one year of age.* She had never told me and I have known the story my whole life, I had just never spoken about it. 

Trauma leaves scars on us and even if we don't recall them clearly, I wonder how they affect our lives going forward. I clearly remember the moment my wife came to me after finding our dieter twitching in bed, I clearly remember as I held her and looked into a contorted face I didn't recognize, I clearly remember the feeling of helplessness, but the calm of taking control of the moment - it is acute in my memory, crystal clear. I wonder how long it will be before that morning doesn't come to mind when I hear a sound coming from her bedroom, her moving in her sleep.

>I hope I will never forget.

The memory is an amazing thing that enables us to do so much that is uniquely human, yet as we get older it fades and twists and just like my daughter's unfamiliar face in that moment, our memories may become unrecognizable to even us, those who experienced them. Some will change over time as we relive the story making new variations that become the narrative, some will change as pieces are omitted that the memory has chosen are no longer important enough to hold, some will be lost completely as the neural paths to their location are broken down as the body decays. 

>We are alive as long as we are remembered by another - but what happens when we no longer remember ourselves, as the story we know is so far removed from the reality of our own experience?

Perhaps, our body carries it all with us as we become what we are today based on all that we have ever been and seen, but it is irrelevant to our conscious selves as the narrative we hold dominates our thoughts. But perhaps this is indicative of why what we do and what we believe are so often contradictory - we tell our story of what we know, but our body tells our story without it knowing, but still remembering. 

There are worlds within us we may never find, times that we lived that were blown away out of reach, by time itself. To remember, may bring the pain of revisiting the past; to forget, the loss of no longer knowing what we once loved. 

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]


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