Source: Own
Yesterday, watching a television program, they did an interview with the writer Marysé Condé and she said that when you talk about memory, you don't know what's true and what's a lie and that they've told us so many things that we think we've lived them.
This reminded me of a story that I used to tell, that when I was a child I had a very clear memory and I had always thought that it had happened to me.
The memory itself was that I was on the Alcaravaneras beach, that I had picked up a beach mat and that I had gone out to sea. Then a boat passed by and overturned it. I held on to it, but I couldn't go up and I almost drowned. Thanks to my uncles who were on the beach and managed to get me out.
I always told this story as if it had happened to me. If I had been in front of a court, I would have sworn and perjured myself that it happened to me, I would even have passed the lie detector.
So many years went by, until as a teenager, an uncle of mine told me a story that had happened to my father and it turns out that it was identical to what I thought had happened to me, but instead of a mattress, my father used a boat.
The story my uncle told me related how my father had taken a boat and got lost. They went out looking for him and spent the whole afternoon looking for him and found him at nightfall, faint, but well.
At that moment I inferred that I heard that story and made it mine, without knowing why, perhaps because I love to tell stories.
After hearing it, I asked my mother if she remembered that something similar had happened to me and she said no, that I had never been on the verge of drowning on any beach, but inside a washing machine, but that's another story I'll tell.
And that story made me reflect on the memories of my childhood, which, perhaps, many of them are from stories we have heard, but which we have never lived and which, for some unknown reason, we make our own and incorporate into our memories as if we had really lived them.
