Memories are what shape you. They define who you are. Who you become. How your Mother held you, how often she stroked your hair, how often she sang to you and fed you with her puckered nipple, her nourishing milk spilling out the small of your mouth.

So who do you become if you can’t remember and all that you do remember is the harrowing silences your Father threw your way as he glared at you through watery beer-soaked eyes, cursing the day that you were born because it was your fault she changed, your fault she stopped singing in the kitchen as she baked her savoury böreks and rolled vines-leaves pocketed with flavourful rice, your fault she stopped kissing him goodnight and your fault she turned to drink even though it went against everything she learnt growing up in that small fishing town in Turkey where they first met under dazzling sunlight and that she turned to hate everything that came inside her and out of her and blamed you for tearing her away from her homeland or so he says.

So who do you believe when you have no memories to compare it to, to cross-check, to say hang on that never happened? The only two people you can believe are the one who disappeared when you were ten and the one who hates your guts even though he won’t say that to your face, says he has wasted his potential taking care of a sick woman who swore she wanted to pack up her small-town life and move to a small city abroad where she knows no one and her memories are made up of darkness ever since her belly swelled. Rather than becoming Motherly, she became feral.

So these are the memories that shaped me, that left me hollow because my mind is also hollow. I have some form of amnesia the doctors say is abnormal because it shouldn’t have lasted this long. I can’t remember anything from before the age of ten, from before my Mother disappeared. It’s why I couldn’t remember her on that fateful day outside my new apartment. I was raking the leaves off the front stoop of Apartment 11B when she called out to me. “I’ve not seen you around before.”

Those words felt familiar. When I looked up I saw someone of small stature leaning towards the black fence watching me expectantly. She lifted her pointed cat-like sunglasses and pushed her hair back, her green eyes followed mine as I straightened myself out, wiping at my brow that had become sticky under the sun. She tilted her head to one side and her long waves of umber hair fell about her shoulders in an untamed wilderness.

Pointing behind me with one hand I answered, “I just moved in”.

“Oh,” she said, “so they finally found someone to take the apartment. Did you know the last tenant died? They found him inside. All sprawled out.”

I passed the rake from one hand to the other as I studied her. Analysing the different compartments of her features and running a scan to compare her face to the many faces I have come across but I couldn’t quite place her.

“Heart attack,” she added when I didn’t respond.

“No wonder the rent’s so low. Was he old?” I asked.

She nodded. “So, do you live alone?”

“Yeah.”

Pushing herself off the black fence, she brushed the dirt off her hands before looking up at me and smiling, tapping a finger against her chin as she said “that’s good to know. I have to go now but I’ll see you around. Soon,” she waved in my direction as she careened off to Apartment 11A next door with me waving behind her, her brown oxfords tapping along the pavement, her frayed leather backpack bouncing up and down with unsteady energy following in her footsteps.

I continued to rake the leaves off the steps before deciding that it was too hot and that it was good enough. I headed back into my apartment, put the kettle on, and settled down to a Teoman album, the deep acoustics rattling out of the speakers. Once the kettle had boiled, I brewed myself some coffee, the cheap instant kind and thought about nothing for a while as my eyes glazed over the stacked piles overtaking the small space. I had ransacked all of my belongings from all of the places I had holed up in and brought them with me to the latest hole for me to squirrel them away.

Boxes heaped together, towering over the bags overspilling with papers and small trinkets, books with dusty pages and loose spines flowing across the floor creating pathways into more hidden treasures. These were my memories. Each item I held on to had its own memory embedded within it. The hideous pink hand-knitted jumper folded in box #21 in front of the bookshelf but behind the leather couch was gifted to me by my old girlfriend who only ate white and red coloured foodstuff. She would mix ketchup with pasta and refuse to eat the roasted aubergine stuffed with mincemeat and spiced tomatoes I had cooked for us because there were too many colours: purple, brown, red, green and yellow. I eventually stopped trying and so did she.

In a tote bag from the supermarket behind the small dining table tucked in the corner sat a wine cork labelled our first home and a receipt marked our last meal together brought back memories of the bedfellows I had made at university who I missed deeply. We’d play pool together and drink beers between lectures, oftentimes stumbling back in half-drunk scrawling incomprehensible notes we’d have to re-write after watching the hour class online on the weekends. We’d have deep conversations at three in the morning when we couldn’t sleep, all of us huddled around the red pocketed sofa in the common room with the key our Residential Advisor friend had.

Only one of us cried when I told them I was moving back to my home city in our last year just weeks before our final exams. They gave me shoulder hugs and punches as they waved me off on that autumn day with red leaves staining the skies and streets. It wasn’t easy as I watched the soft shaded buildings and parks and shops I had become accustomed to visiting and passing the time fading away in the distance like I was in a coming-of-age film and was finally starting life staring out of the car window watching it all pass before my eyes and away into my memories.