In psychology, they say that no human being can truly remember anything before the age of 4. If think you have a memory before that, then they say that memory is just a reflection of stories other people have told you about your childhood; they are not coming from your own memory but instead, from other people recounting their own memories of you. If that’s true then the following events will shock you.

Since she was a little girl, Emelia could vaguely remember a very specific memory. Whenever she thought back to it, she couldn’t remember it completely, but she could visualize it in flashes. In one flash, her mother was dressing her in a pink dress with white shoes. In the next flash, she was in a van with some of her family members and she had a toy baby doll on her lap. In the next flash, she was in a shopping mall with her family, pushing a toy stroller with her baby doll in it. The last flash she remembers is one where she stops in front of a store, and gets her picture taken. As the years went by and Emelia grew into an adult, she began to think that memory was probably a dream. Her mother didn’t remember it, and she couldn’t ask the family members she remembered being around because they permanently moved out of the country. She decided that it was just something she imagined.

A few years later, Emelia and her mother went to visit their grandmothers home in Jamaica after 15 years of being away. The  house is full of memories and images. Emelia and her mother decided to go through old photo albums that were stored in the house. Their eyes filled up with tears as they say their great grandparents wedding photos, pregnancy pictures, and baby pictures of everyone in the family. At the end of the last photo album, there was a picture of a brown little girl in a shopping mall. She was wearing a pink dress and white shoes and was pushing around a stroller with a small plastic baby sitting in it. On the bottom right corner of the image was a date: 05/26/2002. The little girl would’ve been two years old when that photo was taken. That little girl was Emelia, and Emelia is me. Maybe psychologists don’t know everything.

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