I’ve been struggling to recover my childhood over the past few years. See, my memory contains a profound gap. I recall almost nothing of my life before I was about 12. Since then, my memory and sense of self seems like a continuous thread; before it, I know what others have told me, but it never resonates the same way.

At least, that is how things stood a few years ago. Since my summer quest to better understand my father, I have been chipping away at that wall (or, to keep my metaphors consistent, chipping away at the ledge to give me a stairway across the gap). I have been grabbing onto fleeting images, cataloging together floating pieces, and generally disbelieving that these memories are not mine to share.

Here is the product of my most recent tact. I thought to dissect who I am today as the extension of ribbons that have evolved over my life. Every couple of years, these ribbons take on a new turn– an every 7 they twist into a new core (something I’m due again for soon). The roadmap I have figured out is incomplete, but it goes something like this:

There are connections between all of these, which I can’t represent in the table: features that disappear and reappear for reasons complex and unknown. But for all it’s abstruseness, that is my life.