Akio Tsukino

9/11/2025

The Horrors of a Missing Childhood

One of my earliest childhood memories is of a mansion.

I remember the grand rooms and the winding stairways and a nearly impossible to place attic. I remember a car being driven out of an expansive courtyard, though an impossibly tall gate which swung open automatically as the car drove through.

Growing up I had no real memories of any place I could call a permanent "home". I have little to no recollection of living in either of my parents family homes... nor do I have a recollection of the house where I lived as a few months old infant.

Ever since child me developed the ability to retain coherent memories, my parents had begun their habit of moving from place to place. With my father working in the capital, my mother and I were forced to live in cramped studio... spaces. We would move from one place to another every other month or so. And in each one of these new places, I would form new associations with completely different memories.

I remember playing behind a sofa in one of the living rooms of this mansion. I distinctly remember that I was playing with play dough, pushing the clay through the toy syringes, making streaks of stars and other shapes. I do not recall the faces, of those I was playing with.

I cannot assert whether I was alone or with company.

Surely a young child would not be left alone?

I was playing with company.

I came to only remember these half a dozen different places I lived in only by the significant events that occurred whilst I was there. Getting a pet seahorse, seeing a striking clock face with golf imagery, losing my pet tortoise, being left alone and eating a loaf of plain bread, falling down the stairs my parents splitting up... celebrating my first birthday party.

Attempting to sort these clusters of memories on a timeline has proven quite difficult for me. I cannot place any of these different periods of time chronologically. I cannot tell which apartment came first nor which came the last. In a way, my childhood memories live on the brink of fairytale and reality.

The path from the living room to the attic was straightforward. You face the large television in the room and turn right, towards the winding staircase that goes up. I remember the staircase. It was made of wood, with intricate carvings on the forward facing parts of each step as well as the railings. It was straight at a certain point (I remember sitting down on a straight section) but was most definitely winding at the start. After you get to the top of the staircase you run down a long hallway and you'll end up in the attic. Sloped wooden ceilings and beams crossing between the walls make up this impossibly large room.

There was a pool table in the attic.

The little I remember of my childhood is almost entirely fueled by stories I've heard from adults that talked about my childhood in my presence, or things that my parents told me happened during those blurry times. Imaginative as ever, I constructed entire rooms, and worlds to accommodate for these stories. What tethers me to my childhood are not objects of the past or places I can still visit... it is entirely just stories. The rooms and worlds are all to accommodate the empty voids in memory. They are a place to store all the important things that have happened in my life. And in doing so I get to dictate what happened to me. I have control over my childhood... I have control over my childhood.

There was a pool table in the attic.

I don't remember what happened on that pool table. Whatever it was makes my heart rate pick up.

I thought many times of asking my mother about the mansion. Debated with myself on whether or not to tether the memory to at least something tangible. I don't know if I want to.

I don't remember a pool table in the attic. And there was no mansion.