The (un)Making of a Memory

When I was seventeen my parents got me new, adult furniture (a queen bed).  I was ready to ditch my white, faux Victorian looking, canopy bed and matching desk, dresser, nightstand, and mirror.  It was the kind of thing you buy for your little girl because she is your princess, but it was too little girlish.

But as I lay in my big bed I started crying.  At the risk of sounding possessed, I was upset because I had a new room and new furniture and all of a sudden the memories of walking on my own were pushed further away; because my surroundings had changed and I needed something to connect me back to that time.  Something to ground me - to keep the once real from transforming into the surreal, or worse, the unreal.  If you do not have the abilities and you do not have the memories, how do you stay anchored?

My last post was all about the P.C. aka Pitzer College.  Incidentally during my freshman seminar activism in art class we read about monuments that were created more from an absence than a presence... that was also the semester when 911 happened and whenever I think about the pools of water that lie at Ground Zero 

I am reminded of this idea of preserving space with an absence.

I know that P.C. increased its campus size (or its number of buildings) a few years ago.  That perfect campus shape, the reason I went there, is no more.  Had I been born a decade later my life would have, could have, never intersected with the tiny campus and I would have never found a way to (potentially) continue to be able to walk as an adult.

Just like trauma makes the tiny details so vivid and so painful, even the seemingly neutral memories are tainted... like the exterior, interconnected balconies on the second floor of said buildings...or the covered walkways that lead everywhere.

Or the dorm where I took my last steps and the fact that it no longer exists as it was recently demolished.  

I know that you cannot get mad at places for changing... people change, times changes everything but what do you do when the memories fade too?

(These photos are not mine.  They are from Pitzer College, the Honnold Mudd Library, and a website called College Niche.  A good social worker knows how to find exactly what you are looking for and/or is stubborn enough to spend hours searching through photos.  That said the collages are mine and I changed the filters on many of the photos).