Memories I never lived

Carl Jung, when he was 15, had two people living inside him. Growing up was a tumultuous reconciliation between the wise aristocrat who lived hundreds of years before, fighting for control over this new body, and the naive, arrogant youth.

The multiple selves theory of mind says that there is no singular self: Our psyche is in constant battle between selves with different wants, beliefs, memories, experiences. And if so, why not name them? Why not give them a form and a story?

Sometimes a phrase or an image passes by, pauses, and then nestles inside you. Memories and imagination are made of the same thing: hazy images that slip on the edge of awareness but pulse with familiarity. I overflow with memories that others lived but I imagined, aching for experiences that no longer exist; the same way the tree I spent days in as a child is only a stump now.

Sometimes I am Itsuki, a woodcarver, whittling and honing in the farmhouse I have lived inside for 40 years. I wake up and watch the trees change color. My hands trace the outline of perfection with every stroke.

Sometimes I am Francis, a 22-year-old-turned-soldier in the resistance in France, 1940. The snow flurries against my face as I carry canons through the night, footsteps muffled by mountains that keep me safe and hold me hostage.

Sometimes I am Kai, a pottery maker, in a forest by a tinkering stream. Rows of clay pots - gradients of blues and greys - sit quietly on the wooden shelves. Every few months someone slips in, wanders slowly, buys a small pot, then slips away.

Sometimes I am Geneviève, an avant-garde in 1910. I am smoking a cigarette and leaning back in a chair in a salon in Paris, musing on the potential of futurism and the futility of perspective.

Sometimes I am the child of a Neaderthal and Denisovan, hunched against the cold, carving stones behind the rocks we have settled between to protect us from the wind.

Sometimes, I am a never-ending foetus, curled up in the warmth of the womb, deeply asleep, breathing to the rhythm of my mother's heart.

Sometimes these selves are quiet; sometimes they whisper to me incessantly until I am lost amongst threads of consciousness. That I will never again see the snow falling in the Alps in 1944, fall asleep between the 50,000-year rocks, or watch the Japanese farmland change day after day for decades, is more heart-wrenching than all the photo frame memories I can accumulate in one lifetime.