Unreliable Narrator
Copyright March 2025 By Fit529 Dotcom
(Started 3/2025)
== Chapter: We Are Our Memories ==
Though I don't remember it, I was born on a Tuesday. It's probably just as well I've forgotten since undoubtedly it was painful and upsetting.
For that matter, my childhood is mostly an odd half-recollection, memories OF memories, flashes and bits of things. Like most people I think, the original memories might be there but are vague and have merged with what I've been told happened, plus lots of possibly-real, possibly-imagined bits, stories like 'when I was 4...'
My actual memories are flashes, images of places and people randomly assembled, moments of action, oft-compounded scenes overlaid like turning into my driveway. The overlaid stuff isn't separable - like the umpteeth watching of a TV show intro song.
Some memories are traumatic sounds, or happy ones. My mother's laughter, or her sneezes, or where she screamed about something.
Some of my image-memories require a vantage point of being 3 feet tall.
The things that I remember most clearly were traumatic events like when we moved. I was little. It was my mother and I, alone in the car, driving in the desert. Then, there were fields, and we were somewhere else. Snippets pop up. Playing word games, or... imagining that we played word games. It's hard to separate.
Our move was from a small town to a medium-town, far away. Not gonna say where, to protect the innocent.
I was always bookish. I read a lot, we had books all over the house. My favorite books, my favorite times, my favorite memories, all are sitting on a lap, being read to, comfy and loved.
For normal kid-reasons I loved dinosaurs. Their names and years and morphology and latest theories, I knew vast amounts. Modern paleontology means it's outdated now, but BOY I was excited about 'em! Like any kid, I was plenty happy to prevaricate (talk at length whether the other person was interested or not) about dinos and many other things.
Besides dinosaurs, I really liked walking around and looking at plants. Someone gave me a book, 'Gray's New Manual of Botany'. It was way too long and complicated, but the more times I read it (over and over and over), the more understandable it became. Walking around, I'd carry it and use it to identify plants, usually weeds, that grew around our yard and in the rest of the neighborhood.
Our house had a garden, and I had to keep it weeded. I remember a lot of things about gardening, sensory things like dirt in fingers and pulling on thick-rooted weeds and swinging a hoe to break up clods of dirt... lots of things.
I really did know most of the plants I saw. We had some wild areas nearby and I walked through with the Gray's Botany. When I was older, I found I could name genus and species (Latin) for everything I ran into - because I was walking mostly in the same places every time and there were only a few hundred plants to look up.
Later, I liked reading about rockets and space travel, and knew all the parts and what they did and how it worked inside - turbocompressor pumps and ignition sequences and injection plates and all that stuff.
Besides the non-fiction about rockets, I read a lot of science fiction. I never got into fantasy, though, I believed it was anti-math and anti-science and that flew in the face of physics - and I really wanted the world to make sense. I couldn't see the storytelling behind it, I was too literal. It's odd how kid brains work, especially when that kid brain was my own.
There was a library about 3 blocks from my house, so I spent a lot of time there, checking out up to the max of 10 books at a time, sometimes taking them home, reading them, and returning the next day.
All the librarians knew me, and I knew them.
One day we had a new librarian and she said I couldn't check out any more because I had 10 checked out already. I said, no, they're in the return bin right there, and she got them and we were okay.
While she was handling it one of the other ladies came over - I knew her well - and told the new lady about me and that it was okay, I was trustworthy.
I really liked that. I swelled with pride. Of COURSE I was trustworthy, I was a Reader and this was a Library and we just Went Together, and there was no way I'd do anything to ruin that idea.
In school, I was kind of a loner because I had some autism and Asperger's that set me apart from others. The teachers, they let me read during class time because I always knew the answers anyway, and people mostly ignored me. I ignored them, too. It was fine.
When I got to 8th grade, we were assigned a month-long task of writing an autobiography. We had to include all the important details, and a lot of other details and stories, and it all had to be very real. My mother had to sign off on it, even, that the stories were real and I hadn't missed anything.
We had to include details of every vacation, every trip, every relative we'd met, the big things that happened in our lives, all that we could. I had an easy time - we'd never been anywhere, after we moved. We'd never taken a vacation anywhere. We had no money for that.
I remember laboring over the assignment and writing enough to fill a notebook. The notebook was one I got from my communicants' class at the Catholic church, it was a super-nice bound-book one with paper that absorbed my pen nicely. I loved writing in it.
Everything was in-bounds for this autobiography. I even included what my everyday life was like in 8th grade, who my friends were, what I did from morning to night, tv shows, what books I was reading, everything.
Describing my friends was easy - they were obsessed with sports and I wasn't. I didn't care. They knew the names of teams and players and performance stats and who might be good later and all the things I just didn't give a solid good-God-damn about.
Not being fat or thin was an advantage, in that I didn't get teased, just picked for games in the middle of the pack. I was neither gifted nor tragic, just mostly average and treated that way.
My mom had a minimum wage job so we didn't have much money. She'd grown up on a farm, so we worked together (okay it was mostly me) to dig up a huge section of our backyard as a garden. This took significant effort, though mostly that declined as I learned tricks to do it easier (thank you, librarians, for 'gardening tricks' books). We managed to raise an immense amount of vegetables, which we then canned or just froze in the late summer or fall. The bounty meant we could eat more cheaply all winter.
Mr. Jenkins, an older retired guy down the block, liked my mom a lot. He brought us lots of fish since he went fishing almost every day and caught tons.
Mom filled our freezer with his fish and we always had some, fresh or frozen, filets or soup or whatever.
In retrospect, we had far better nutrition than our neighbors who had far more money. They ate junk food. Our carrots tasted like CARROTS not cardboard and I got to be kind of a snob about that, though I was instructed carefully to keep my mouth shut. We couldn't afford to share, and Mom warned me that neighbors sometimes sneak in and take your produce. They might think it's just one thing, but each of those one things takes a huge effort to raise given the number of weeds that grow and how hard it is to bend over to pull them.
So that was my life mostly. It was decent as a childhood, maybe better than average, but otherwise unremarkable.
In high school, I wasn't into sports or music, but I did go on a few dates freshman, sophomore, and junior years. These were complicated by my being somewhat 'on the spectrum' (high functioning, not a big deal) and even though I could mostly act normal, sometimes I just didn't understand what some social implications were.
My dates and other high school stuff was fun enough that I even added them to my autobiography.
So, this was my life, until the day of my 18th birthday, my high school senior year.
== Chapter: Birthday Night ==
Turning 18 for most people would mean a party, but for me it was going to be the following Saturday; a friend of mine from DND (dungeons and dragons was a fun diversion) just said we'd celebrate my birthday later that week as part of our normal Saturday game.
It was fine by me to wait a few days since I knew his mother was Turkish and made incredible baklava - OMG that Baklava!!!!!
So with homework to do, I settled in at my desk to crank through my trig assignment, something I generally had trouble with and had to spend actual time on. I liked the topic, I just had trouble concentrating sometimes when I lacked sleep, or (as I'd recently figured out) when there were too many new symbols it was intimidating and I'd have trouble just starting the assignment.
But... Then...
My entire life then changed.
It felt like a shifting of perspective, like when the elevator drops and your vision goes weird, or a blink when you've had a head cold and suddenly you're looking in a different direction than you thought.
In that moment? BLINK - and everything seemed... Very Very DIFFERENT.
I struggled to understand what had moved or happened since I was still sitting in a chair at my desk. The confusion was real, though, like when I woke up after a dream and tried to separate where I was and realize what was happening around me.
It was so sudden and odd at the same time. I realized I was hearing a buzzing - in my head? It wasn't a noise FROM anywhere! I plugged my ears, it was the same volume, like tinnitus but all different frequencies, and suddenly.
Then, a voice spoke.
The voice was female, and older, like a mid-30's person talking, but nice enough, not like a mom scolding, just sounding like a calm, normal, average older person.
The tone of voice was like someone describing an event, or telling a story.
It said the following:
[[ NARRATOR: Sometimes learning a new thing can have big consequences. As Kevin recently learned from a video, it's best to treat math like playing piano. You aren't 'good at math' or 'bad at math', you're just well-practiced or not. The vid had said, do ALL the problems in a chapter, but importantly you have to do them in a random order or your brain doesn't really get any practice selecting the right trick to solve the specific problem at hand.
Math is easy when you're confident of the previous material, and only learning the latest skill. ]]
Suddenly, another voice cut in, a girl's voice, younger, far more urgent. I didn't recognize it.
VOICES IN MY HEAD?!??!?!
WTF!??!
[[ AUTHOR: No... NO, No. Has to be shorter, to the point... ]]
[[ NARRATOR: As Kevin settled in to do his trig homework, he decided to take his teacher's advice and do ALL the problems, from the front of the book onwards, until he could do them fast and right each time. Then, it'd be easy to do the new stuff. Kevin liked that, so he literally opened to the first page and started his entire Trig career over again. ]]
