My aunt sent a home video from 1994 last spring. I'm eight years old in it. I don't remember the day being filmed.

I watched it three times in a row. Then I had to stop.

The child in the video moves with complete unselfconsciousness - they don't know they're being filmed, or they don't understand what it means. They're completely present in the way I'm never present now, taking up exactly the amount of space they occupy without apology or calculation. They're explaining something to someone off-camera, very seriously, something about how birds know which direction is south. I don't remember knowing this. I apparently knew this.

I became so interested in this child. I felt something protective and also something like grief - not for the child who was lost, they weren't lost, they became me - but for the quality of the being. The presence. The seriousness about birds. There's a particular loss in realizing you were once capable of something you can no longer do, and the capability didn't leave through any identifiable door.

I know the factual answer: school and self-consciousness and all the machinery of becoming socialized. The world teaches you to be small and careful and I was good at learning. But something that was native to that child - a complete commitment to the present moment - that I cannot find now under any conditions.

Have you ever watched yourself as a child and felt like you were watching someone else? Did you recognize them? Do you think they would recognize you?