I am trying to stitch some sentences into meaning, but a toddler is wobbling around me like a drunkard. My distracted mind—the metaphor machine—turns him first into a ball ricocheting off furniture, then into a bee buzzing around my head. It doesn’t bother me. He is a small learning engine. The ricocheting is his way of probing movement patterns, the buzzing his way of mixing and (mis)matching the languages that surround him.

I watch him from above the sentences I am sewing together, and when the passage finally takes shape, I notice a strange rhyme of circumstances: the paragraph I stitched is from Mary Oliver’s essay:

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child’s voice—I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished… It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

Now a different, distant child is wobbling in my head. I try to understand what my relationship with him is.

It has always puzzled me how easily people identify with their younger selves. I see the logic behind it, but I don’t trust my memory enough. I worry that the child I’m identifying with isn’t a real child at all, but a story—a myth, a fable—composed by my current self. I hear people say they finally understand their adult behaviors and traits through the lens of childhood, but I suspect that the child is just a literary figure we endlessly rewrite.

The toddler is now playing outside in the orchard, buzzing with the real bees. I put aside the book and reach for my guitar. I play a random sequence of notes and recognize the opening of The Summer Knows by Michel Legrand: E, B, C, A. I repeat it a few times to weave a small blanket of nostalgia. I permute the four notes and find other familiar, poignant themes. I see the structure behind the emotion: ordered from lowest—E, A, B, C—we get only the “sad” minor third and minor sixth. And there are the intervallic leaps (EA, EB, EC); such leaps, set against clustered notes, are often the universal ingredient of melancholic soundscapes.

Suddenly, one of the motifs pierces straight into an older emotional layer.

I am six years old, and my grandpa has just given me an electronic toy-watch. It has a stopwatch with decimal fractions of a second. My friends and I compete to stop it at the lowest possible value; Kamil is leading with 0.14. The watch also plays twenty melodies. It is still two years before I get my walkman, so this is my only source of portable “music,” and I cherish it like nothing else. There is Beethoven’s Für Elise, there is El Condor Pasa, and then there is melody #19. To hear it, I need to press the button nineteen times. I lie under the covers at night, listening to the thin, monophonic beeping. No one in my family can identify the tune, so it remains a number. Many years later, I learn it is a theme from Romeo and Juliet by Nino Rota.

Now, after decades of never thinking about it, a permutation of four random notes brings back the child obsessed with a toy-watch melody—and the child obsessed with pressing a button to beat 0.14 seconds. It has not vanished… It is with me in the present hour.

Did these small obsessions of a small human make me who I am now—the person who goes down rabbit holes of trivial things, who repeats four notes in permutations to understand why they pierce so deeply? Maybe. But does determining the truth really matter? Maybe it was only a few nights with that melody that my memory later inflated into “countless.” Maybe the watch wasn’t that “cherished” after all. I have no recollection of what happened to it. No drama, no trauma of losing or breaking it.

Perhaps it’s better to treat the boy as a literary character—one sitting on the same shelf with Peter Pan and Little Prince.

Perhaps it’s neither better nor worse. But I’ve always enjoyed reading fiction.

nino (n.): a sense that the child you once were extends seamlessly into who you are now, in a single, unbroken thread—when in truth that “child” is a set of discrete, disjointed memories and self-authored narratives the present self continually rewrites to justify its own existence. A child-self as fiction—an ever-updated character mistaken for something real.

(from Spanish niño—child; and Nino, a diminutive of Italian Giovanni—which in Polish corresponds to Jan—anchoring the word in the author’s own self-mythology.)