Two Stories, One Person

I did a thing on Tumblr just now where people would give me a number corresponding to a question they'd like me to ask, and a few of them had to do with childhood memories.  It's funny, because for me, just thinking about my childhood beyond a certain age is a task.  Not because I had some terrible brain injury that made me lose memory past a certain point, but for (arguably) more bizarre reasons.

It's not the remembering that's hard.  I still remember a lot of things about my childhood: teachers I had, friends I made, toys I loved, TV shows I'd watch, places we'd visit...  It's not even that it's hard.  It's just...well...awkward.  That's what's so weird, how can remembering childhood be awkward?  I haven't quite figured this out.  But it's like there's a wall in my brain that was built at a certain point, and everything before then is different.  And it's funny because nearly half of my life is behind that wall, and I don't always like going through it.

That wall was built on October 26th and 27th, 1997.  That's the date my family left JFK International Airport in Queens, NY on an Air Europa flight to Madrid Barajas Airport.  That's the date my life tangibly changed permanently, to the point where everything that occurred before then would become a life that I would never know ever again.  Up until that date, I had never known any country other than the United States, had never known a language other than English, much less known anyone other than my grandfather who spoke a language other than English --and even then, he never spoke Norwegian around us--.  And as soon as we landed in Madrid and were whisked off to sit in the Madrid police station for four hours doing immigration papers and then sit in a dark van for another four hours listening to two men up front jabber on in a language we didn't understand.  We stopped for dinner somewhere on the highway between Madrid and Bilbao and fell asleep in mounds of rice because we were too jet-lagged and exhausted to eat, and were dropped off by the side of the road in Leioa to wait for someone else who didn't speak our language to bring us to our new home.

I don't know how many other people have such a tangibly intangible wall dividing their memories.  I'm sure there are others, most likely a lot of them had traumatic experiences to cause them to build that wall, maybe others with not so traumatic experiences.  I just know I can literally divide my life in two parts: pre-Spain and "post-Spain".  Pre-Spain for the twelve years I spent as a fairly clueless kid who liked reading atlases and encyclopedias, who enjoyed learning about the world but who had never traveled much farther than to the East Coast of the USA and the occasional shortcut through Canada.  "Post-Spain" for everything since then.  Since I first discovered Euskera my first week of school when we had to choose a language to study and I didn't want to take French.  But I wasn't allowed to take Euskera because I needed to speak Spanish first, and then when I first heard it spoken by real-life people by my 6th grade homeroom teacher to our tour guide on a class field trip to Urkiola, a nature reserve about an hour away.  Since I became fluent in Spanish within nine months of landing in Spain.  Since I started public school and soon afterwards met the girl who would become my best friend for the next eleven, twelve years.

It's just so weird to look back on my life before all that happened.  It's like I wasn't even me back then, I was someone else.  Some other kid.  None of the things that happened to me before then made me who I am today, except for maybe that innate curiosity that helped me discover the world and learn about it.  But none of the events, none of the deciding moments in my life before then actually changed me.  Moving to Spain changed me, so looking back on my childhood is like watching a movie.  A movie that I was a part of and had a role in, but little else.  It really is bizarre to think that at one point, I did live that life.  And I think that's what's so unreal about it.  That I can't imagine living that life now, but I know I did.  That's what's strange.