Fictional Pasts

Childhood memories; overwritten in our mind so very many times by the accumulated dust and doubt of the intervening years. Whatever resemblance they once held to those past selves we once inhabited, to that progressively layered sedimentation of which our selves are ultimately composed, these moments are now like so many sloughed snakeskins shed, initially discarded and then later regathered and tossed upon a crackling bonfire of self-knowledge; that we may stay a while here, secure and kept warm huddled by the flames of our own poorly-remembered pasts.