First, we need to address the pachyderm on the premises, the issue being that my given surname is Gilligan. Troy Gilligan. Yeah, Sherwood Schwartz pretty much set me up for a lifetime of teasing back in the early sixties with his silly sitcom and its iconic, dimwitted leading man. So I changed my name to Gill, Troy Gill. No more ribbing about three-hour tours.
Toughen up, you say? Easy for you with your normal brain and thick skin. You see, my challenge is that I remember everything. Not just a lot; everything. That brings painful past events, even minor teasing, into the realm of my present experience. It’s not like photographic memory, summoning up pages of text like a mental PDF. My old stuff feels like current stuff, whether being badgered mercilessly about Skipper and Ginger or recalling the time I sneezed and a gob of green mucus landed with a humiliating splat front and center on the blouse of the school’s homecoming queen. And then she threw up.
But that never happened to me. It happened to the owner of one subset of my memories. Now, don’t go thinking I’m schizophrenic. I don’t hear voices or think I’m Jesus. I have full recall of conversations, printed images and sensations that cross traditionally defined eidetic and photographic memory boundaries. Plus, the duration is all wrong. Unlike traditional mental disorders with fading dreamlike thoughts, my memories endure forever, vivid and intense. And I don’t know who they belong to.
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