I thought this was normal, honestly. I have many times in my life torn my entire house apart to find one small object because I had to. I also have a similar out look on death, to be honest. The people are just not in their bodies right now, that’s all.

1. As a young child I saw these few certain movies/TV programs (I think they were British childrens’ shows of a “spooky” nature — one was called “Children of the Stones” and one was called “The Witches and the Grinnygog”).

I did not really know what was going on in any of them plot-wise but the imagery and music from them really stuck with me. But I never had them on video tape (this was long before DVDs) so they just sort of disappeared. And for years during my middle-to-late childhood I wondered if maybe I’d *dreamed* them or something. I went around looking everywhere for proof that what I’d seen actually existed, because for some reason it seemed like that would be some kind of weird validation that my younger self was real and had really seen what she thought she had. I think I was around 19 years old when I finally started having semi-regular Internet access, and one of the very first things I ever did with Google (if not THE first thing) was look up those shows I thought I remembered, and while I still have not been able to find them on video or DVD to this day, I did find proof that they were REAL. Which just felt all kinds of awesome, like completing a circle or equation between now and years ago.

2. I also used to go back to my elementary school, etc., and try and find people or objects associated with earlier school years. I remember being utterly voracious about getting into the attic in my parents’ old house starting in maybe 4th or 5th grade, so I could rummage through all my old papers and school reports and such. Again, I think this was some sort of “proof of the past” thing. Same with looking at old photos…I think I do probably have similar perceptions of time as you describe, because it often feels preposterous that I cannot just walk down a corridor somewhere and visit 1987, etc., so I have to reconstruct it with pictures and objects.

3. Even though I have (what people have told me is) an extremely good long term memory, I find it really hard to *trust* my own memory a lot of the time.

I suspect this could be because my life probably deviates from standard cultural narratives, but I’ve been pressured in weird ways to try and frame it always in terms of those narratives. Hence when I want to write about something, or even just casually relate something, about something in my past, I feel like I place this massive burden of proof on myself.

E.g., I was bullied a lot as a kid. I know this, I experienced it. But there’s pressure to look back on that and say “oh it wasn’t REALLY that bad”, or even “that didn’t REALLY happen”. It is as if there are two layers at work here: one on which I know what was/is real, and the other on which I know I am terrible at convincing people of things with words, so I am not inclined to even bother insisting on the realness of something unless I have the means to reconstruct the past, etc.

Hopefully at least some of that makes sense.

I’m not sure if this shows that I am different from you (that a dead friend coming back is a big deal — if I still thought of them as alive, then, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them, right?) or that I’m similar (the idea that a dead friend could suddenly reappear at all, because this is clearly impossible).

I often think that my mastery of language as echo rather than language as communication, masks a lot of the way I actually think about the world. Because I learned what words others would use. And that covers the fact that were I to use language closer to my perception of the world, the tenses among other things would be quite different. Could be interesting to try to write that way, but then I would have to become conscious of every little way my perceptions are unusual, and that would be hard because they feel quite usual to me.

For instance, I have a photo of my mother in front of the house I grew up in. My brother is inside the house, barely visible through the screen door. My mother died several years ago, my brother hasn’t spoken to me in 20 years, and yet, I feel as though I could simply walk through that door in the photograph and enter in, and that the only reason I can’t is that I haven’t figured out how yet.

It’s possible we’re simply perceiving things outside of space and time, in which everything exists at once. It’s only in linear time that things appear to change or die.