I don’t really remember. When I first realized who he was after a month of hanging out with him, I might have said something like “I remember you — we used to get into fist fights on the playground when we were kids”. But at that point, it was more nostalgia.

He didn’t remember that interaction. I think he remembered my name, his parents lived a couple blocks from mine, so all the neighborhood kids knew where every kid in the neighborhood lived.

But we were different people by this point. Even though I remembered him in a negative way up to that point, the guy I was getting to know in the present wasn’t that kid. And I had to reconcile the two characters by deciding that the one I saw in the present was the real person, and whatever happened with the kid decades before simply didn’t matter.

Make sense?