Our car turned a hundred thousand miles today, a perceptual marker of sorts, until one considers that for one mile the attached assembly of gears might spin a thousand times, thus our car turned ten billion revolutions today, depending how you look at it, and that is where you begin. George Berkeley beat the average con-artist seminar speaker by about three hundred years, arguing that perception is reality, meaning if you can't see, hear, touch, taste, or smell it, then it doesn't exist. It turns out you are the center of the universe, and everything actually does revolve around you, and it doesn't even cost a weekend and $500 to find out.

    The car was purchased in Texas in November, which is remembered only has a sensation of non-heat, so much of the year feeling identical to preheating an oven with the door open. There is no memory of the first mile, for that was driven by someone else moving the car, and thus did not happen. From there, the memories are measured not in miles but trips, tickets, and accidents, in destinations, not in traveling, and that is a little sad. For when we look back upon the millions of revolutions completed, how few we find remain, and perhaps in desperation we search for the first as solace from the last.

    I remember a very small room, which was popular because it was easier to keep warm. My grandparents lived in a huge house deep in the mountains of West Virginia, mountains upon which white tendrils of fog would slither over trees every morning, not unlike the rattlesnakes that could be found upon their property with some frequency. They lived in a great, old house painted yellow, with a porch that ran along the whole outside of it. To get to the house you would drive cross a rickety wooden bridge twenty feet above the 'crik,' as my grandfather would call it when walking me there to drop bottles with notes to float away like memories.

    I remember my grandfather, waiting for him on that porch, waiting for him to return from a day in the coal mines, covered in the deadly black dust that would eventually claim his life, though if it hadn't been the Black Lung then it would have been the fried diet. Everything we ate there was fried, chicken, steak, potatoes, vegetables, everything except ice cream. It wasn't ice cream like we eat now, gentrified with names like 'green tea' and 'red bean,' but ice cream that was little more than milk and sugar frozen. We would eat great gobs of Neapolitan in huge bowls, sitting upon the porch swing in the summer, and the only sounds were the smacking lips and the creak of chains as the swing swayed with our cold delight. I and my grandfather would sit so because my grandmother was dead.

    I remember my grandmother, not from the box she lay within upon the table in the dining room, though I remember that from the top of the stairs in the hall, peeking in fear just under the height of the ceiling, dressed in a little red suit and tie. But that is not how my grandmother is remembered, nor closer and pallid, and so still, when my grandfather came and got me. He lifted me close to his face and took me downstairs, the scent of Old Spice almost physical when I kissed his cheek, and the taste of salt in his tears, as we stood before her casket. That is not how I remember my grandmother.

    My grandmother had been expecting I would be a girl, but if she was disappointed—aside from putting me in a dress for my baptism—she never mentioned it. I have seen the pictures, but they are not real because they are embarrassing and I do not remember them. I do not remember my birth thirty-nine years ago, so it must not exist, just as Berkeley does not exist, nor all the memories lost between the turning of gears in the relentless drive forward until the engine gives out, or there is a trade-in, depending on belief system. Yet I feel compelled on this day to find the moment of creation, and kneeling upon the floor, counting my breaths, discarding stray thoughts as playing cards tossed at a hat, I remember her.

    I hit my grandmother in the head with a hammer. It was a toy hammer, true, but made of wood, and the sound upon her skull was not too much different from the heavy rap of knuckles on a door. My mother yelled at me to stop, but my grandmother, who was dying of the cancer but felt better that day, enough to crawl upon the floor with a toddler, said it was all right.

    It was all right, as she sat upon the floor, rubbing her head. I did not hit her again, but rather awkwardly reached for her head, her thin hair so very soft, the flesh of her skull so very warm, but thin and terribly aged, like yellowed parchment. Her eyes, however, her eyes were as warm and full of life and promise as the first day of creation, and thirty-nine years after my birth I hold close the gift of memory.