Duality of Memory

People say memory is soft. That it blurs at the edges, that it shifts, that it protects you from yourself. Mine never did. Mine stayed sharp. Mine stayed loud. Mine stayed exactly the same every time I revisited it, like a photograph that refused to fade. But everyone else’s memory of my father was a different creature entirely.

They remembered a man who was proud of me. A man who bragged about me. A man who “lit up when Gill walked into the room.” I remember a man who told me he hated being seen with me. A man who said he only loved me because he had to. A man who hit me when I stood up for myself, and hit me harder when I didn’t. Two memories. Both “true.” Both incompatible. And everyone swears theirs is the real one.

My father never called me Priscilla Lee unless he was angry. Most days, I was Gill. Gill wasn’t affection — it was indifference. A shrug of a name. Something tossed at me like a tool he didn’t care about, something he could leave out in the rain. But Priscilla Lee meant the air changed. It meant the room tightened. It meant he was about to say something he’d pretend later he never said. Everyone else remembers him using my full name because he was proud, rolling it out like a banner. I remember him spitting it like gravel. Gill was the name he used when he didn’t care enough to be cruel. Priscilla Lee was the name he used when he did.

People like to rewrite the day I called CPS. They say I “finally stood up for myself,” like it was some triumphant movie moment. It wasn’t bravery. It was panic. It was exhaustion. It was a seventeen‑year‑old who couldn’t take one more hit, one more insult, one more night pretending the house wasn’t a battlefield. I had run away and was staying with a friend. Her guardian came to my work and really looked at me — the black eyes, the bruised neck and chest, the way I flinched at sudden movement. She grabbed my hand across the counter and said, steady and certain, “You’re not going back there.”

I remember my hands shaking so badly I could barely function for the rest of the night. I remember telling her everything — the names, the hits, the bruises on me and my sisters, the way he used Priscilla Lee like a loaded gun. She promised she’d be there when I talked to the CPS caseworker. And she was. But my father showed up first.

He stood in the doorway like he owned the world. He smiled. He joked. He charmed. He lied. He told her I was “psychotic.” He told her I “misunderstood things.” He told her I was “acting out.” He told my grandmother I “stole the car” — which was true, but only because he refused to let me learn to drive. He said I’d “have sex in cars with boys.” He said skirts were “easy access,” even if I was riding with girls. And then he turned to me — just slightly, just enough for her not to see — and murmured, “Priscilla Lee, you fix this. You fix this right now.”

I knew what that meant. I knew what would happen if I didn’t. So I lied. I told the caseworker I exaggerated. I told her I misunderstood. I told her I was sorry. She left. And the second her car pulled away, he told me I wasn’t going back to the house where I’d been staying. He told me I was being shipped back to Maine. He told everyone I was in a gang. A gang. Me — a kid who could barely raise her voice without shaking.

Maine wasn’t a fresh start. It wasn’t a punishment. It was a disappearance. He sent me there like someone mailing back a defective product. No explanation. No goodbye. Just a decision made without me, about me, because of me. My family in Maine welcomed me, but they didn’t know what to do with the version of me that arrived — quiet, jumpy, already learning how to make myself small. They asked why I was there. I told them what he told them: that I was in a gang, that I was dangerous, that I needed “structure.” They believed him. Why wouldn’t they? He was charming. He was funny. He was the man they remembered — not the man I knew.

I spent years trying to stitch myself back together. Years in therapy. Years in the Air Force. Years learning that my memory wasn’t broken — their version was. By the time he died, the rewriting had already begun. My stepmother swore she never hit me. She swore he never said those things. She swore I was “too sensitive,” “too dramatic,” “too emotional.” She said I “remembered things wrong.” She said I “twisted things.” She said I “made mountains out of molehills.”

But memory doesn’t care what people need. It only cares what happened. And mine stayed sharp. Mine stayed loud. Mine stayed true. His death didn’t soften anything. It froze everyone else’s version of him in place — untouchable, unchangeable, unchallengeable. But mine stayed alive. Mine stayed moving. Mine stayed exactly the same.

I didn’t grieve the man they remembered. I didn’t know him. I grieved the father I never had. I grieved the childhood I didn’t get. I grieved the truth no one wanted to hear. We all remember him perfectly. We just don’t remember the same man. Their memories protect them. Mine protects me. And maybe that’s the real story — not who’s right, not who’s wrong, but how a single person can fracture into two completely different versions depending on who’s looking. Maybe the disagreement tells more than the facts ever could. Maybe the truth isn’t in the memory itself, but in the space between them.

Authors Note:
This story is built from my own lived experience and the conflicting memories that shaped my childhood. Every person involved remembers the same man differently, and this piece explores the space between those versions — the place where truth, denial, and survival collide. I wrote this not to reopen old wounds, but to acknowledge the reality I carried alone for years. Memory is complicated, but it’s also honest. This is mine.