50.

Today is my father's birthday.

When I was little he used to lift me onto his shoulders and then "forget" where I was, and he'd wander around our two-bedroom apartment for almost an hour trying to find me while I sat way up high giggling with my legs hanging down onto his chest.

I called him this morning, and I miss him.

Emotional amnesia.

I'm coming back to myself after a long time of being absent.

This, I think, is a common thought that I stumble upon repeatedly -- once or twice a month, whenever the seasons change, whenever circumstances jar me out of complacency.

I feel destined to repeat this growth process for the rest of my life, just as Clive Wearing's journal reveals the full force of his retrograde amnesia:

But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake. . . . 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake. . . . 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.

(Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_sacks?currentPage=all#ixzz0kpvMQUvk)

It's difficult for me to continually feel like myself. I think I get too caught up in ambitions and associations and goals, which everyone says you're supposed to set and maintain and use as a measure of something important.

But I always find myself losing myself during the academic year, only to emerge during the summer into a better sort of existence, and I wonder during my transitions why I let it get that way.

My conclusion is that I need to travel again. I think back to last summer and the trip to Oxford as one of the most self-affirming times of my life. I need the distance and the space to recreate that feeling, in order to discover again what it means to be fearless. So: Tibet -- may you cure me.

Everything has everything to do with myself and nothing to do with any of the expectations I pile on myself, or any of the people in my life, or any of the lies I tell myself about why things happen.

This is the hardest lesson I will always forget.

Bumped on the shoulder.

A note that this piece has three distinct narrators.

Yes, I remember that day. I remember it because it was the night before my seventh birthday, and we were in the kitchen squeezing frosting flowers from makeshift Saran wrap tubes. I cried because you were better at it, then. Your ten-year-old fingers had acquired dexterity, and mine were still pudgy with the remnants of baby fat.

Your flowers were flawless budding wonders, almost lifelike in waxy splendor. When I looked at the confused splotches of icing that seemed to ooze out of my frosting tip with drunken abandon, I felt an emotion I could not name for another decade. It was a pressure in my chest between tightness and paralysis, a flush that rose to my sunburned cheeks without my consent or recognition. I was not a part of my body, but something operating it with strings from a distant corner—tugging at tenuous strands with questionable results, unable to predict the next jerk of my limbs.

I cried with the foggy frustration of a toddler. Later, I swore that I saw you sneer: a grimace frightful for its too-large front teeth and their jagged and plaque-covered edges. Or maybe you bumped my shoulder so that in a moment of distracted envy I dropped my tube of icing and left a path of pink on the tiled floor. Or sometimes I remembered your face as it screwed into a grimace (of what? of anger? of scorn?) and your hand coming toward me, fierce and huge-seeming, and I wasn’t ready but I knew it was coming anyway (why?) and I hated you as even as my shoulder smarted and I knew that I’d crossed a line from somewhere to somewhere else.

“You were picking on me!” I’d insist years later, but you would always deny me my defense. And even to myself, I sounded a little like an excuse worn thin with doubt, but then why the sobbing I remember so well that I can still sometimes taste the salt trails on my cheek? “You were being mean, I know it!”

But the moment would have already passed. They always did that, when I was around you. How often had I turned around to say something, only to find myself talking to your shadow? How many times had I yelled at your back as you exited a room, oblivious to my objection raised a moment too late?

Yes, I remember that day. Maddie and Lea were having their birthday party, but Maddie was scared, poor girl—she didn’t have many friends in her class, and only a few RSVPs had come back for her, though we’d sent out invitations two months before the scheduled date. Lea, we never had to worry about—she was already the princess of her first grade class, the sunny kid who doled out cute smiles as though she’d invented the concept herself.

But Maddie, back then she was always an unfriendly remark away from tears—nudge her the wrong way and she’d whimper and go off somewhere to lick her wounds. We said it was because of that one morning the baby monitor broke and we didn’t hear her crying until well into the afternoon, when we were already about sink gratefully into a session of well-deserved and all-too-rare—and we realized, suddenly, that Maddie was so unnaturally quiet, that she’d never been that quiet before.

When we’d finally hurried to the crib, she was a trembling bundle of snotty sheets, and though we picked her up and soothed her shhhh mommy’s here daddy’s here, don’t you worry now, sweetie, there was nothing sweet about her look of betrayal, about the way she distrusted us, and therefore everyone, and therefore the entire universe. Lea was still blissfully sleeping at the other end of the small mattress, even as Maddie in her infantile tantrum managed to kick her no less than a dozen times, but we were used to that, with Lea.

And you could already see the worry working its claws into Maddie, the way that crease implied itself between her eyebrows even in infancy, before any true worries of the world could have tainted her soft baby-smell aura. It was as though she knew, with a child’s preternatural instinct, what was to come, as though perhaps things just went wrong around her the way the dazed curiosity of innocence clung to other more fortunate babies.

Most years, the reminder of her birth was answered by a reminder of something inevitably gone awry: the economic collapse around her eighth birthday, Greg’s alcoholism that developed around her tenth, the fire that destroyed three-quarters of the house only weeks after her eleventh birthday. She was drawn to disaster, a child of catastrophe.

But it was all started, I suppose, with the accident that happened on the day of her seventh.

That day? That day was the day I started lying. I was only ten, but I knew what it meant to know something that someone else shouldn’t. I knew how to keep a secret. When Maddie saw Lea’s frosting flowers her eyes lit up while the rest of her seemed to darken and become tenser. I knew why she was so interested in Lea’s flowers (my flowers weren’t nearly so plump either), and for a second or two I felt sorry for Maddie, always the withered version of Lea lurking in the background, not quite as brilliant or as friendly or as anything, really, as Lea was.

Which is probably why I didn’t get it at first when Maddie pounced—it was such an action, a dynamism she’d never before achieved and never really did after, either. But that’s the word I would use for it now: pouncing, one feline stroke of motion across my field of vision, savage in its animalistic immediacy. Then Lea was on the ground, her icing tube landing in pink streaks on the kitchen floor, Maddie with her hands pinning Lea’s shoulders and pushing her deeper into the tile, if that could at all be possible.

Lea’s head had grazed the edge of the kitchen counter during her fall, and now where the jagged stone edge had collided with her skull there blossomed a redness that grew steadily and symmetrically into the yellow strands of her hair. In Maddie’s eyes, now, a ferocity that had not been there before—something more alive than the dread with which she’d been whining minutes earlier, it’s no fair that my flowers are squishy and ugly.

I only know that I yanked Maddie off Lea because that’s what they told me I did. Afterwards my hand hurt, and Maddie was too stunned and too young to understand the cause-and-effect of me and her and Lea, still lying motionless on the floor with the redness sloppy-spreading around her.

Silence.

—And then Maddie crying, the always-distant sound of sirens, a party canceled and birthday cake left uneaten on a countertop, how old are you and how old did you become just now?, Maddie staring up at me with a wide-eyed contempt.

And later she would write sentences in her journal such as “If I am cruel, it is because I learned cruelty from my sister,” and I would know she meant me, that though she would almost instantly forget this incident and warp the memory in her mind to fit with a childish purity she never actually experienced, she would remember this.

She would forget the twin sister she had slept next to for seven years of her life.

She would forget the pictures we took that day, and three other photo albums of identical chubby faces—“lost,” in the fire that destroyed much else of our past lives.

She would forget her own role as actor, as catalyst, as killer.

She would forget this, but she would remember that day, at least in part, and the part that she would remember: she would remember me, my violence, my ten-year-old rage, my permanent role solidified as her personal oppressor.

If you are cruel, little sister, know this—if you are cruel, you did not learn it from me. You already knew it. You knew it all along.