Memory

One of my games, when I was very small, was to make up a cleaning service. I would grab sponges, buckets, brushes, and redo entire walls, cleaning off grey sludge and leaving them new and beautiful. I remember how perfectly this worked, I remember how I was surrounded by lots of friends that helped and laughed at my brilliant jokes. One time, my mother sat and watched this magnificent operation, laughing with a camera in hand, probably to record my dizzying wonder at such a small age. I remember explaining to her my system in perfect eloquence.

Curiously enough, in what is the resulting video, I'm not in it at all. Instead, a small, frizzy haired and big-eyed girl is standing against a wall with yellow striped wallpaper, holding one of those dishwashing wands with a sponge on one end and soap in the handle. Without making any difference to the wall, she clumsily slaps the wand against it. While spinning around in lopsided, lumpy circles on her heels, she speaks around the pacifier in her mouth in third person, both to her imaginary friends, one of which seemed to be Winnie the Pooh, and to the camera, explaining that Onyon (my nickname at the time), was cleaning the walls.

What a difference the imagination of childhood makes.