Forgetfulness

what does it mean to forget something? i mean, i know we have a pretty good idea scientifically, but what does it really mean? i saw this video once where a girl asked her entire family to draw the layout of her childhood home. the home had long been demolished, and thus existed only in the minds of its residents. it was a house of divorce. none of their drawings looked the same.

i don't remember much from when i was a kid. i know everyone says that, but it's a serious problem for me. most of my childhood memories are still images i see on my mom's facebook, or tagged posts on old friends' social media. it feels like amnesia. it isn't like nothing is there--it's just like a book i read once, fuzzy and distant, somewhere in the background but nowehere even tangentially related to my life. does that make sense? there's some vague lingering malaise surrounding those years, but no... actual memories. why is that?

anyway, memory is a funny thing. it's explored pretty thoroughly in kane pixels' The Oldest View, a series i've loved for several years now. in it, a teenager explores this giant abandoned mall in the middle of a field. the lights and music still work, and all the signs point to a town in dallas, tx he doesn't actually live in. on his second exploration into the mall, the vast staircase leading underground collapses, leaving him trapped until he finds another exit. this is all well and good, besides the threat of starving to death, if it weren't for the giant.

the giant, without spoiling much of what actually happens in the series, appears to be the looming threat behind the mall's existence. it's an imposing ten-foot structure, shoddily built, resembling an old man with vacant eyes and a great black beard. he has flowers for hands. the watcher theorizes that perhaps the mall was built to contain or entertain it. perhaps the giant killed the mall's creator. perhaps the giant was a human once, trapped in the vestiges of this cardboard puppet. but really, the mall and gian't story are much more tragic than that.

thank you to the maker of this gradient