Intruder of my own memories

Childhood is, to me at least, the most special time in a person’s life. Childhood is the innocence we once possessed but lost somewhere along the road as we grew older. Childhood is being carefree, being loved unconditionally, and being as unreasonably demanding as we could without anyone having the heart to refuse. Childhood is when we had the most beautiful memories of our lives.

With such sentiments attached to it, childhood always has the power to evoke overwhelming feelings from me every time it crosses my mind. This evening was one of those instances.

I went with my mom to my grandparents’ to visit an uncle of mine who just came back from the US. (The house has technically been my uncle’s after my grandparents passed away a few years ago, but in my mind it is and always will be referred to as “my grandparents’ “.)

Being an introvert and to some extent, an anti-social that I am, I did not stay in the living room with everybody else, but sneaked up the stairs and wandered to the room which my parents and I used to stay in when I was little. Needless to say, this room holds dear childhood memories to me, and I felt a slight sense of nostalgia as I stepped on the worn out ceramic tiles into the room.

The black-and-white checkered tiles are oh so familiar, but as I looked down at the feet standing on them – my own feet – I felt like a stranger. My feet were no longer able to fit perfectly within the 20x20 tile. I no longer had to jump to reach the next white tile on a straight line. The once seemingly endless distance from the door to the window now only took me a few steps to cross.

It was then that I realised this room, together with all the memories it had witnessed, belonged to the long gone three-year-old me. It was, thus, neither a surprise nor an irony that I felt as though I had never entered this room, because the eighteen-year-old me had, indeed, never done so.

I felt like an intruder into my own childhood world, not entirely unwanted but not so welcome either.

I have many different feelings about this, and I cannot really name each of them. There is one, though, which I am certain of what it is: a crushing sense of loss.