“It’s strange. For the most part, she had a very good memory, but she remembered quite vividly something which couldn’t possibly have happened: going out on the playing field of her high school with her science class with a radio to listen to the beeping of Sputnik I as it passed over Portland, Oregon. The reason it couldn’t have happened as she remembered it is that she was graduated from high school in 1955, and when the first satellite in history was launched in October of 1957, she was married and living in California. Very odd.”
“Okay, that’s an odd thing to misremember. And her memory had enough details that it couldn’t have been something different?”
“Right. She remembered her science teacher and her classmates, the playing field, and so on, and she remembered the excitement of hearing about the launch, how none of her classmates were frightened or angry that ‘they’, the Soviets, had done it first, only delight that ‘we’, humanity, had done it. And it was definitely a satellite passing overhead, it really couldn’t be anything else, the way she described setting up the radio. Puzzling.”
“It really does sound as though she went to high school in some other universe.”
“There was one other memory which really disturbed me, because we remembered it differently, except this one was so personal and private that I had no way of demonstrating it to her the way I could show her documents that proved the first satellite was launched in 1957. I remember vividly how, early in our relationship, she began bleeding vaginally, and her doctor told her she was suffering a failed pregnancy and needed to have a D&C immediately or she would eventually bleed to death. He asked me to leave the room and she emerged about half an hour later telling me that it had been a rather unpleasant procedure, and rather messy, and that she had gotten through it all right and was glad to have spared me having to watch it.
“I mentioned it years later, and she said nothing of the sort had ever happened to her, and she couldn’t possibly have been mistaken, since she would of course remember it. I made the mistake of arguing the point with her, and it put a strain on our relationship for some time.
“Unfortunately, since we never talked about it with anyone else, and the doctor himself retired and left town, there was no-one I could talk with about it, even to satisfy myself that it had really happened. A mutual friend mentioned the incident recently, but it turned out that it had been something I had said about it, so I can’t even count that. Frustrating.”
“So even in a relationship as close as the one the two of you had, you still lived in different worlds.”
“Apparently.”
https://wordsfortheyear.com/2014/03/13/the-name-of-a-fish-by-faith-shearin/
