The things we forget and the funny details we remember

The mind's ability to forget traumatic experiences is amazing.

A friend was telling me how she was mugged a few months ago. She lives on a poorly lighted street and was knocked down by three men who stole her bag off her. About five minutes into her recounting, I remembered: I'd been mugged too, at gunpoint. Oh yeah. It was senior year of college and I was living at home with my family because I was being forced by Cal to graduate early (something about a limit on how many credits you were allowed to have before you got kicked out) and was planning to spend the rest of my senior year working in Korea.

I had been out at some Korean drinking establishment with some friends, dropped some of them off at their apartments in Berkeley, then drove home to Albany. It was about 2:30 am. I remember driving down Solano Ave., turning on my street and seeing headlights turning the same way in my rearview mirror. I remember thinking: what a coincidence that someone else on my street is coming home this late on a weekday night! (My family lives in a relatively small, ex-hippie town that doesn't have much in the way of nightlife, unless you include the 7-11 that is open 24 hours)

I pulled into the driveway, took the key out of the ignition and reached in the backseat for my purse. I saw a figure coming towards my car and my panic sensors immediately turned on. The car had automatically unlocked the locks when I pulled the keys out, I frantically pressed the lock button. The guy came up to my window and pointed a gun at my face and told me to open the door. It was so surreal, I couldn't believe what was happening. I froze and I think the words "oh my God" kept repeating itself inside my head. I had no idea what I should do. He took the butt of the gun and smashed it against the window, causing a big crack but not breaking it completely. I decided to unlock the door, since he was obviously going to get in, one way or another. He told me to get out of the car and I did. He said "give me everything" and I handed over my purse (and really stupidly for some reason, dropped the entire set of keys inside the purse before doing so, which had the keys to the car, my house, my dad's car, etc.). He told me to kneel on the ground, facing the garage door, and I did. Then he told me to lie down. I don't know if it was a conscious thought or just a woman's reflex, but somehow, those words scared me more than the thought of being shot. I'd rather be shot than raped - ever since that moment I have felt very clearly that as between death and rape, I would 100% prefer death. It was the first time I spoke to him: "I gave you everything I have. Just go." He repeated: "lie on the ground." And I repeated: "LOOK, I gave you everything I have ok? Please, just GO."

I heard his footsteps retreating, I heard a car door slam, I heard the car drive off. I didn't turn around for fear that if he saw me look at him, he would shoot me or come back.

I ran to my front door and frantically started ringing the bell and pounding on the door. The police came and took a report but I couldn't describe much other than that the guy was a very clean-cut young black male wearing a Tommy Hilfiger shirt. I didn't see the car, the plates, didn't look directly at his face except for a millisecond when he was pointing the gun at me, at which point I was really looking more at the gun. They never found the guy, but a couple months later the police did return my purse to me, which had been discarded at the Albany racetracks.

The details I remember about that night - not what the kid looked like, no details about the car, not even what the gun looked like. What I remember is this: the smell of the crisp fall night (early morning), the overalls I was wearing, how the concrete felt against my knees while I was kneeling, the details of the garage door I stared at while I was kneeling.

***

Another lost memory: when I was 5 or 6, I came down with a rare neurological disorder called Guillian-Barre Syndrome, which basically paralyzed me from the neck down for several weeks. The paralysis starts from the legs and moves up the rest of your body. My parents noticed something was wrong when I kept falling while I was walking. They attributed it to clumsiness at first. Then one night I was walking up the stairs at my grandparents' house and my legs buckled beneath me and I fell down half a flight. They realized it was serious when I couldn't stand back up.

I was admitted to Children's Hospital in Oakland and stayed for about 3 weeks. My mom tells me that for several months afterward, I had to go through physical therapy to rebuild my muscles and learn how to walk again, but I don't remember any of that. I don't remember much about that time at all, except that my mom had to feed me because I couldn't move my arms, someone brought me smurf stickers (the 3-D kind made with rubber with a piece of foam inside that makes it puffy) - I really really loved those stickers, being rolled into an operating room while lying on my stomach and feeling like they poured ice all over my back before losing consciousness, and being fascinated when during a follow-up doctor's visit, he gently tapped my knee with some rubber hammer and my leg popped up on its own.

Memory is such a funny thing, no? How random is it that the clearest memory I have relating to the time I was paralyzed, hospitalized and operated on is puffy smurf stickers?