My earliest memory... I don't have one really. I'm afflicted with a rather disjointed and fragmented childhood. Until I'm about seven or eight years old my life lacks any sort of timeline. I have in my repertoire of memories a handful of powerfully traumatic events, rather than a smooth stream of encoded consciousness that I can recollect at any time. These events define my family for me, the few hardships that I can remember are all that I have to go on when attempting to determine who I am in terms of my family and upbringing.
    If I did need to chose one early memory though it would be an earthquake that I experienced with my sister and my mother. We were living in an apartment somewhere in Portland, Oregon, we had a female black cat named Violet.  I think I may have been getting ready for school. Either way I'm moderately confident that it was morning. I was performing some mundane morning action like eating cereal when all of a sudden the apartment began to shake. And shake. And break. We all just stood still at first, until a door-length mirror slipped silently to the floor before it shattered with a subtle tinkling crash. My mother grabbed us then. As she hustled my sister and I out of the room I looked back to see the kitchen wall sloping outwards at an ever more alarming angle. Looking back at that wall is the last thing I remember of that day.


    I do agree with Joan Didion about what makes a memory true. Because whether or not any of my above memory truly happened, I have the experience in me. I can smell the hallway, I can feel my mother's had grasping my arm in a painfully tight hold. I can see that wall sloping outwards against nothing but the air. I remember what I wrote very clearly, what's interesting to me is how clipped my recollection is, at either end of what I wrote there is nothing but a currious darkness where more experiences should be.