I am sitting in my childhood bedroom at one a.m. on a Saturday. Particles of dust are moving upwards in the pools of light made by two adjacent desk lamps, both with great bungee necks that stretch out, lording over the mildewed debris of a childhood not forgotten, but separated and distanced from.

I am at a loss inside this mess, this memory. I can’t sort it. Can’t figure out what to feel and where to put those feelings when, finally I find them. And this stuff - How do I choose what’s important. What’s worth holding on to.

I so rarely come back here – it seems foolish to hold onto what I’ll never see.

It appears to me now, amidst the mold and dust and exhausted artifacts, that I lived splayed out and split between two sides. Two stories. The her and the him and the opposing parts of me that align with each. They are so different, my parents, and in trying to transition fluidly between the two, I sacrificed essential parts of myself.

I did not know they are so different. Nor did I know I’d slipped into unconsciousness. Into resolute unseeing. And that is why, I think, so much of the past is opaque. All those years – after she left, after they split – are unlived in my memory. It’s as if I woke up here. Stepped into being and took their word for what the past was.

Ask him and it was one way. Ask her, another.

Ask anyone involved, but don’t ask me. I was too busy surviving to stow away the memories of it. All I’ve got is this stuff, damp and decaying. This body, brittle, bony and just beginning to bounce back. These records, these clues of a girlhood lost.