The Memory Of My Shadow • Ebook

My name is not Mary Espinoza anymore. It’s Magdalena. Just the one name. I changed it when I turned eighteen and started my freshman year at MIT. I did not want my name to be the story of me that everyone heard before I even opened my mouth. When I have had friends, they called me Maggie, but I don’t really have any friends right now. Maybe one day when there is less to be done, I will have time for friends.

I started my story in the middle, the gruesome, fractured middle. I believe all stories start in the middle because none of us can speak with any accuracy to our origin. There was a time before when memory was malleable and fluid, like quicksilver. In the telling of our stories, we could take liberties. What choice did we have with such a flawed instrument as the human brain but to invent what was not properly recorded? Children born after 2052 will never know what it was like to have to remember, anymore than my grandfather’s generation could imagine a time when numbers had to be calculated with pen and paper.

I have never told the story of my brother Joe out loud or in written form. When I read it back I even question if it is true. It seems unreal just as most of what I will tell you in this story will seem unreal. You may even begin to question what is real and that’s okay. I think it is a necessary point in our evolution as a species, to reach the end of our ability to understand and then to choose to leap and trust.