The Woman Who Can't Forget Read Online Free Page B

and I slammed it shut but it swung open into my eye. I was leaving for Florida on my first trip without my parents (Boca to see grandparents and aunt and uncle and Philadelphia to see Cathi and Dan) on Sunday 12/22 and I had a black eye.
    DECEMBER 19, 1986—FRIDAY
    Finishing up my time at LAVC.
    Went to work at Nordstrom’s Rack—HATED THAT JOB.
    Perhaps one reason that I remember days so well is that my brain seems to love to organize time. One of the unusual ways it does so, which intrigued the scientists because again it was so unprecedented, is with visuals that I just “see” in my mind. The first of these is a time line of history, which covers not just my lifetime but goes back to the year 1900. I have no idea why this is the case, nor do the scientists. The way I drew this time line for them is as follows:

    When they asked me to describe how I saw the time line on several different occasions, I always drew it exactly the same way, with the same set of years and with all of the lines the same range of lengths. I can’t think of any reason that it’s this particular set of years I see or why I draw some of the lines longer and some shorter. I also have no idea why 1970 is the pivot point at the top left, where the time line switches from horizontal to vertical.
    The scientists remarked how counterintuitive it is that the dates start at the right and proceed to the left, like reading Hebrew, and then down rather than up. But to me that’s not counterintuitive at all; it’s simply the way I see them. They don’t know what the significance of this time line is in the way my memory works or why I see history in this fashion. As far as I’m concerned, I can’t imagine not seeing the time line in my mind.
    That isn’t the only visual that took shape in my mind as I grew up. I see single years as circles, as in the diagram below. June is always at the bottom and December always at the top, and the months progress counterclockwise.

    Because my memory became so complete, I began to act as the historian in my family and among my friends, regularly reminding people of the dates of events in their lives and “refereeing” disputes about when something happened. “No, it wasn’t in July of 1998 that you two went to Italy, that was August of 1996.” “You’re both wrong. The date you had that huge fight was Saturday, November 16, 2002, and you patched it up on December 11.” “Grandma didn’t come to visit us in January that year; she came on March 14.” I like dating events that way and don’t mind at all when people ask me to do so. That’s probably the most clarifying way in which people start to understand just how different my memory is. I even used to joke that I should open a “Stump the Human Calendar” booth on Venice Beach, near where I grew up in Los Angeles.
    The truth is, though, that as much as I like that my memory is so complete, it’s been terribly difficult to live with. My lack of talent for memorizing is only one of the many features of my memory that have influenced my life in ways that have been seriously challenging, often excruciating. One of the most troubling features of my memory is that it is so automatic and can spin wildly out of control. Though I can direct my memory back to particular events I want to remember—and when asked to, I can recall memories in a systematic way, such as when I’m given a date or an event—when my memory is left to its own devices, it roams through the course of my life at will. Memories are popping into my head randomly all the time, as though there is a screen in my head playing scenes from movies of years of my life that have been spliced into one another, hopping around from day to day, year to year, the good, the bad, the joyful, and the devastating, without my conscious control.
    Perhaps they’re not actually random. They do seem to be