For the majority of my life I’ve had the very vivid but very ridiculous memory of Elmo and Kermit the Frog walking slowly down a foggy street on their way to a murder spree. I can still see the dented trash cans they passed and the dying brown grass they walked over. Obviously, I never believed this was an actual event. I always thought it was from some comedic horror-parody movie. People love seeing their nostalgia perverted.

There was no movie. For so many years I was so confused why no one else could remember it, or why I could never remember the movie’s title, but I never once considered there wasn’t really a morbid muppets movie. The memory of that scene was so vivid in my mind. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I began to realize that I might have been wrong all that time. Now, I assume it must have been part of some nightmare I had as a child falling asleep while watching PBS.

A lot of my earlier memories are just surreal fragmented scenes and impressions.  Floating through pale blue hallway and a woman with extremely red lips murmuring under her breath. A swing set in a backyard that is perfectly grey. A man who lives in the woods behind my neighborhood and sings to bees. Someone standing in my room in the early morning who is facing me, but not looking at me.

I don’t know if any of these are real, or if they were dreams, or if I just made them up entirely at some point. I’m not sure if it matters where they came from. However these thoughts got to me, they’re still always going to be a part of me in some way.