Raspberry Canes, Nineteen Eighty-Six.

You maybe think I’m a miserable person already, because of how I introduced myself. I’m actually kind of fun most of the time. At least, I hope so. Regardless, I’m pretty easy to entertain. And if the last couple of thousand words haven’t clued you in already, I’m pretty easily distracted, as well.

For example, I’m going to talk about something that happened over twenty years ago in this chapter, which even the most patient of us would admit is almost completely unnecessary. On the other hand, I explain things best by points of reference.

Where am I? Literally, right now, I’m thirty, I’m at my desk, in my flat, in Edinburgh, and I’m trying to remember being twenty, because I think there was something worth knowing back then. Something worth feeling, at any rate. You remember how I came in on that? Now, I know what you’re thinking, if you’re thinking at all, and if you’re anything like me.

How do I know that what I am searching for was ever really there?

You’re wondering, maybe, if I’ve deluded myself about the wonderful year I spent in Fife Park. Maybe you’ve even seen Fife Park for yourself. Maybe, you’re thinking, I’m just wearing my rose tinted glasses.

That’s a good point. Sometimes, even I’m given to wondering if I was ever really as happy as I remember. After all, it’s been a while. And Oscar Wilde famously said that ‘Nothing ages like happiness.’ What if I’m only remembering the good, and discarding the bad?

I’m quite sure that’s partly true. I don’t see that as too much of a problem. Good riddance to the shitty times, I say. There were a few of them, after all. But I’m also quite, quite certain that, perhaps against probability, I am not just making something out of nothing. There really was a special feeling to those days that underpinned it all.

How do I know? Because I remember it, sure. But not just because I remember it, but because I have one perfect, unalterable memory of it - and it is a memory which is not subject to the usual distortions and the decay of time. This memory cannot lie, because it is as much a message as a recollection. It was constructed out of purpose.

I have only a handful of such memories across the whole of my life, and they are all special to me.

The first now seems to be almost from a different world. When I was seven years old, I wondered how memories might work. I knew that I did not remember everything, but that important moments were prone to stand out.

Sitting on the low wall near our raspberry garden I felt the setting sun on my back, on my side, and the chill of the early evening pinching lightly at my bare legs. As I balanced on the wall, so I balanced between warmth and cold, day and dusk, aglow with contentedness. It was a beautiful moment, in an ordinary day. But it was a moment I decided to keep.

So I committed to keep that memory forever. I took the moment apart, piece by piece in my mind’s eye, and swore to myself that I would remember it for the rest of my life. I made it the most important thing in my mind, and I sat there running it over and over in my head, till I felt like it was burning behind my eyes. I kept it going until long after the moment had passed, until it was nearly dark. But I don’t remember the dusk coming on, or how I went inside, or what I did before bed. I remember sitting there, in that moment, warmth on my back, making a message in a bottle, in a mind. And it’s funny because, though the time between then and now seems like twenty times forever, I know I am the same person.

I also know how I felt that day. Not just because I remember the feeling, which could have been misinterpreted or glossed over with time. I know how I felt because I remember the process of remembering. I remember what I was trying to say, the message in the memory. I remember what I told myself I would.

So there is the answer, in a roundabout way. I know that I was so perfectly content in St. Andrews, because I told myself so at the time, and I’m almost certain that I wouldn’t have lied.