one

I'm constantly wondering if I can actually trust my memory. I have a hard time remembering whole events, but I can remember snapshots -- brief flashes of images, snippets of sound, a faint sense of an emotion that no longer lasts.

But I have faint memories that still play on loop in my head. It's like when I watched The Sound of Music on VHS so many times as a kid that only small snippets of time play, and the rest is a blank screen. I remember being nearly three years old and walking down the block near Prospect Park, waiting for my baby sister to be born. I remember being seven, or maybe even eight, and meeting my cousin Kristin for the first time -- I just got a Nintendo DS for making my First Communion, and I wanted to teach her all about the cool microphone feature that it had.

Bigger things stick out in my mind. I remember nearly every detail about the day that my parents announced they were getting divorced. The smell of burning rubber tires on blacktop. Kristin taking me to the movies, letting me eat all the buttery popcorn on top before she had any. Taking me to my favorite restaurant and letting me eat only appetizers for dinner. Going to bed that night thinking that the house was oddly quiet, and yet the deafening silence was too much for me to handle.

I remember the first time I met Kristin's first child, Cadence. It was two months after her birth; she had a hole in her heart and a MRSA colony growing inside her when she was born two months early. She cried when I held her in my arms for the first time. I handed the baby to my mother and ran to the bathroom in tears. How could this baby hate me, when her mother did so much for me?

And then there's this memory -- not really a child anymore, but not quite comfortable with being a teenager, either -- of sitting in a hotel room in Washington DC with Cadence crying in my lap as the TV droned in the background about saltwater aquariums. It's been nearly a year since Cadence and I had our first meeting, and our relationship has been rocky. I'm trying to get her to stop crying, but it's been nearly ten minutes. I was brought on this trip to babysit while Kristin went to a wedding, but my confidence at this point is so shaken that I'm not quite sure who the baby is.

And yet we're sitting in front of the floor-length mirror, staring at our reflections. Cadence huffs and whines until the condensation forms on the glass, and then watches as it dissipates. She strains against my arms and reaches a fragile finger out to draw shapes -- constellations, really -- in the fog.

I remember how fragile this moment was, as any sort of interruption could shatter our brief moment of peace. The funny thing is, I don't remember how this ends, either. Maybe she falls asleep right there. Maybe she starts crying again and I call her mother in tears (probably the latter).

Maybe that's all my memory is, anyway -- huffing and puffing, willing a snapshot to surface in my mind, and then watching it slowly fade away into oblivion.

Cadence had to see me off to "The Ball", better known as Junior Prom.

Our relationship isn't so rocky anymore -- I'm now her "bes' friend"