The Retroactive Interference of Door Codes

Illustration by Mia Dong

The good old-fashioned sensory overload of returning home from college. The gnawing strain of my backpack, heavy on my right shoulder. The Pacific Northwest’s distinct smell of pine trees and wet soil. The unavoidable stale taste in my mouth from sitting closed-lip in an airplane. The insistent sound of Lucy’s bark muffled by the door. A sight so familiar I hesitate to consider these sensations a memory. With ease, I lift my quickly numbing right hand to type in the code for my front door. The door I was carried in through while I lay slumped fast asleep on my dad’s shoulder. The one I crawled past, ran past, stumbled through, and snuck others inside. As I press “enter,” the keypad flashes red. Following a moment of confusion, I realize I had typed in the password for my student home. Here we have retroactive interference of door codes. 

In psychology, retroactive interference refers to the phenomenon where learning new information interferes with the retrieval of old information. By learning my new password, I lost the automatic memory of my home. I felt that my muscle memory deceived and betrayed my senses. Even though I consider my childhood home my real one and my student home a place of residence, my conscious opinion holds little stake in the debacle. Though I haven’t planted roots in Kingston, my existing roots have learned to acclimate to this environment and changed me in the process. I can understand this and still be bitter that my memory does not care to ask me about my preferences. Why is it that when I go home, I am always surprised to see that the shingles on my roof are greyed with age? I expect them to be unchanged. My memory visualizes dark brown over grey, it respects the home I saw as a child. Even when I drive up, for a second, the roof is bright, and then I blink it away. How can my memory keep my house young, yet can’t hold two codes at the same time? Why is it that some memories freeze while others get replaced?

I shake off the existential spiral lodged in my stomach and step over the threshold, entering my home. The bitter moment shifts in a jump cut as I launch myself toward my dog, whose tail wags with excitement on the floor. I drop my heavy bag onto the ground, privately grimacing at the impact of what is surely my laptop hitting the stone entryway. As I carry Lucy, bridal style, away from the mudroom, abandoning my suitcase at the door, I scan her over, obsessively searching for proof that she hasn’t forgotten me. I know it’s dumb, but the very thought that she might have forgotten me is the benefactor for my investigation. What if, during my fall semester, she found someone she cared for more than me? God forbid she cares more for my sister, or for my cousins who came from Nanaimo to stay on the mainland for months. I hold her up above my head, hearing the chorus of “The Circle of Life” playing as I sternly protest, “You know me, Lucy. Those other bitches are nothing. Trust me.” She wiggles away as she sees my mom come into view. I realize then how happy she seems. When I last saw her in August, she refused to eat or drink and lived with her tail tucked between her legs. Has she already forgotten Charlie? 

When our 13-year-old geriatric dog Charlie was put down in August, I was the only one of my sisters to go with my parents and Lucy to the vet. Needless to say, I did not handle the experience with grace. Later, when my sister came home from her summer in France, we talked about Charlie’s death. She told me that she was grateful she wasn’t there in the room. When I tried to change the subject, she intervened and said, “This is why.” At my confusion, she expanded: “You don’t want to talk about him because when you think about him, you see the image of him dead. When I think about him, I see him alive and know factually that he is dead. I like remembering, and now you want to forget.” I agreed with her, of course, but I couldn’t help but feel bitter that she got to remember his life and I his death. Now, as I stare at Lucy clamoring for my mother’s attention, I remember the painting I brought back from Kingston, still in my bag on the ground. As I bypass my mom, who is standing behind the kitchen island, she asks me where I’m going. Without answering, I fish through my bag until I catch a flash of purple. I pull out the 8x10 flat canvas and hold it up for her. She smiles sadly at the painting of Charlie and Lucy that I worked on for hours in the bedroom of my student home. She takes it from me, inspecting the hours of brushstrokes I put into capturing the Byronic expression of his aged face. “Natty, you did a really good job,” she tells me. “This is exactly how I remember him.” I crane my neck to see, preening at the compliment. As I look at the painting, I realize that this is how I remember him, too – my sister’s assumption was incorrect. The hours spent staring at the reference photo had overwritten the image of him dying, replacing it with something softer, something truer. A different kind of retroactive interference. She sets the painting above Lucy’s dog bed, and I return to the mudroom to grab my suitcase. As I grip its handle, about to walk away, I realize I had left my headphones in the passenger seat of my mom’s car. Leaving through the same door I came in, I lock it instinctively, the way I’ve grown accustomed to doing at my student home. On my way back from the car, headphones in hand, I enter the code without thinking. 

This time, I get it right. Memory is fallible and subject to change, whether or not we permit it. But sometimes, in its endless reconsolidation, it grants us kindness.