In her earliest memory, Michelle Williams is on a preschool field trip to the local park in Montana. She is wearing a brand-new yellow dress made by her grandmother, with a purple unicorn on its pocket. One moment she is feeding the ducks in the pond, the next she has gotten too close and has fallen in. She’s not in danger—she is standing there in the shallow water—and so she just stays where she is, shocked at this unexpected turn of events. Shocked that at one moment you could be feeding ducks, the next you could be wet. Shocked that something so benign could change so quickly. And she is also thinking something like: I wonder if I just stand here nobody will notice. Maybe I could be a duck.
She has another memory, just a little later. She is at her great-grandparents’ house, also the location of her earliest memory of delirious happiness (riding bareback, galloping through a field). But today there is a big storm, and she is outside playing in a puffy jacket, and when she tries to get back to the house the wind blows her around and she runs into the barbed-wire fence. And she realizes she is stuck. The harder she tries to escape, the more the barbs go into her jacket.
She told me these two stories—I’d asked her to think back as early as she could recall—in Los Angeles while waiting for her tortilla soup. And then she wondered aloud: “So why does my mind choose those two memories that can be used as metaphors for the rest of my life? Was I always who I am now?”
(Source: kafkaesque-world, via amor-omnibus)
