My memories frequently diverge from others’. It’s not that they remember something that I’ve forgotten… it’s that I remember something vividly that was markedly different from what they remember, which they remember just as vividly. I sometimes remember completely different situations and events than they do.
The first time this ever happened, the way I remember it Bill went down to [REDACTED] and visited with a relative of his who had recently been in prison. He hung out with him for awhile and smoked some of his weed. When he came back, I asked him if he brought some with him and he hadn’t. He said it was good weed, though.
The way Bill remembers it, he visited with his relative and brought a bag of weed back with him. He rolled up a joint and we smoked it together. He said it was good weed, but I sat there the entire night freaking out and repeating the phrase: “I’m not having a good time, mannnn.“
Another Bill incident revolves around some money that I lost. What happened was one of Bill’s friends P.J. came over and smoked weed with us. After he left, I noticed that about $100 of mine was nowhere to be found. I blamed P.J., even though he and Bill were good friends, and insisted that he had stolen it. Bill said, “I don’t think he would do that, man.” I later found the money in a CD case on a shelf, apparently I had hidden it there in a drugged haze and forgotten about it.
The weird part is that I remember this happening in [REDACTED], and that it was hidden in a CD case, and I found the money immediately after P.J. had left. The way Bill remembers it, we were in Lexington at our shared apartment, and I had hidden the money in the pages of a book and didn’t discover it until weeks later. He also claims that was the same day that P.J. got some weed off random neighbors in our apartment building, but I remember those as distinctly separate incidents.
A couple of such incidents also happened with Al DeLarge, who I also roomed with at one point. One of them involves the game Rez. Al claims that we used to play it in an altered state all the time on the PS2, but I maintain that I had never seen the game until it was released for XBOX LIVE Arcade. He is flabbergasted by this.
Another time, we went to Chicago to see one of Kubrick’s films being shown via a special print. (Kubrick films are near religious experiences for Al.) The way I remember it, we got stoned before we went in to see the movie (I’m starting to notice a pattern here). We went to see A Clockwork Orange, and since I was paranoid, I felt like we were being watched carefully by the staff since we were a pair of unusual, high mo’fuggas coming to see such a violent, counter-cultural film. I felt eyes upon me. But Al maintains that we didn’t see A Clockwork Orange there at all, that it was 2001 instead, and that we saw A Clockwork Orange here in Lexington.
Our differences have been so strong on these memories that we have actually argued about it for 30 minutes or more at a time, each trying to convince the other that he is right. Bill especially gets quite angry when I maintain that I am correct. Since my memory is unreliable anyway and most of these events are clouded in marijuana smoke, it is most likely that my brain is simply displaying its faults and has constructed false memories. It is an extremely weird experience to have false memories. You have people telling you the opposite of things you remember in exact detail, that they never happened. It makes you doubt yourself.
I’m pretty stupid though. I like to think that these incidents happened both ways, that somehow each of us slipped into a dimension slightly different from the other, without anyone realizing it, and experienced different events there. It’s a little mystical and a little dumb but I think it gives the world mystery. Everybody rolls their eyes at me when I tell them this.
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