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This Is Us
The Body Records, But the Mind Transcribes
Notes on a childhood memory
My earliest memory, and thus the beginning of my selfhood, has absence at its heart. I don’t remember much about knocking out my front tooth. By that I mean I have an incomplete, fragmentary recollection of what happened Before and what happened After. I remember sliding around the kitchen floor in my socks. Getting a bit of momentum, sliding toward the stairs at the back landing, then turning around and doing the same in the opposite direction. My mother was in the kitchen, too, moving between the sink and the stove. My sister was sliding with me, sometimes in front, sometimes behind. The game might have been to see who could slide the closest to the edge of the stairs without teetering over, I’m not sure.
I don’t remember tumbling head first down the two or three stairs that led to our back door. I don’t remember cracking my face against the door. The moment itself—the smashing of the tooth—is, perhaps fittingly, a blank, a black hole. So is mostly everything that comes immediately after.
I think I remember sitting on the back landing, looking down the stairs into the darkness of the basement. My sister comforting me. A sense, just off the edges of my perception, that my mother was frantic — perhaps she cried out. I think she ran…
