My very earliest memory is quite ordinary and even pleasant. I was standing in the kitchen of my grandmother's house, waiting for a bottle of orange juice my mom was preparing.
I remember specifically coming to consciousness in this moment - that is to say, I know that I did not have conscious experience before and simply forgot it, rather, I seem to have discovered the opportunity for consciousness in this moment for the first time. When I did, I noticed that this child whose head I was inhabiting had already been going about the business of life in quite the ordinary way for someone his age. My arriving made absolutely no difference to events, and yet, I by sticking around, I was the beneficiary of the experience - the taste of the orange juice was heavenly.
After that, I left conscious experience again and popped back in from time to time. Each time I returned, I'd find the child going about his life in the ordinary way. There was no continuity of memory, because there was no continuity of experience. But there WAS continuity of behavior.
I didn't establish continuity of experience until much later, shortly before my 4th birthday. At that time, my mom lived in an apartment complex, and she'd let me wander around and visit other children in their homes, go to the pool and get sunburnt, and generally entertain myself as I wished. I became aware of this state of affairs through process of deduction - my consciousness came to the body, looked around, took the measure of reality, and *deduced* the life that I had been living in my own absence.
Actually, the event which fixed my consciousness into the body in a continuous way was quite traumatic. I was visiting another child in her mother's home, a girl. I think she was a little older than me. I was drinking something out of a cup with a red and white striped straw, and suddenly, the girl hit me on the back of the head with sufficient force to drive the straw into the back of my throat, causing noticeable injury and quite a lot of pain. I had not learned the skill, yet, of retribution. I had no ability to scold or reprimand her. I simply cried, suffered, looked pained, and left to go home and complain to my mom.
I'm still not angry with her, because from that point on, I've had a total continuity of experience in this body. I remember the following weeks in great detail. They were full of strange miracles. I got a new bicycle as a birthday present. The bike was immediately stolen when I left it outside for a few minutes at the apartment complex. My step dad threw me into the pool to "sink or swim" and ended up having to jump in fully clothed to rescue me from the bottom of the pool. My mom and I adopted a stray cat who would become the most beloved pet of my entire life.
I called 911 one day, partially to get my mom back for being dismissive of me, partially just to see if anything would come of it. I have no idea where I got the number from - I'd not started school yet. Who told me 911 was an important number? Maybe I figured it out by some strange mystical deduction. Maybe 911 wasn't really an important number until I *determined* that it would be so. I have no way of deciding, because this experience has been magical and inexplicable from the very beginning. Anyways, the cops showed up to see if I was being abused. I told them a ghost had made the call. I stuck to my story.
Submitted May 03, 2019 at 05:14AM by owlentity http://bit.ly/2DK7XUB
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