Where are my memories?

I'm supposed to be writing a paper for my writing class right now. Its a descriptive essay about the place we're from and how its made us who we are. Being a "descriptive essay" it needs to include a lot of sensory memories. Which I don't feel I have. My memories are like that word that's on the tip of your tongue, a word that you know is somewhere in your memory bank but you just can't access. My memories are like a box of out of focus, sepia toned pictures with yellow edges you'd come across in a second hand shop, they seem somewhat familiar, but still distant. They are two dimensional and I long for the texture of my childhood but the longer I am away from that place, the place where I grew up, the place I feel like a fraud if I refer to it as "home," the more faded those memories become until they no longer even seem like mine. I don't even refer to the place of my childhood as “home,” not having been back there in almost ten years. I hear my friends talk about “going home for the holidays,” a concept that seems so foreign to me. I get a little jealous about it. I want to experience the place where I grew up as an adult, to be able to feel the Kansas air fill my lungs and touch the dirt my child hands touched. I want to be able to build a new relationship with this place, one based on love and appreciation for what and who inhabits the space rather than a resentment and a longing to leave. I remember being a twelve year old kid and knowing even then that I had to leave as soon as possible. It was then that I started thinking of Topeka as a temporary place of habitation, beginning to create some distance even before I left. This mirrored the distance I already felt from my family, a distance I began to feel at the age of four when gender expectations were formally introduced to me, a distance that increased over the years, especially with my father.
My most recent memory of being in Topeka is a ten year old memory. At the end of a 52 hour bus trip, the Greyhound I was riding pulled off of I-70 and onto the run down streets of downtown Topeka. I hadn't been back in a couple of years and it looked smaller, more dilapadated, grayer, than I remembered. It was was cloudy mid-September day and fall had already settled in Portland, but here, it was still muggy and hot. Stifling. A familiar sense of strangulation began to settle in and I took some deep breaths as the bus pulled into the station to avoid passing out from a panic attack.
Even this memory is fading. Like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I feel my memories slowly being erased and it makes me feel a panic and desperation to hold on to them, even the hard ones, the hurtful ones. I want to remember them because they are mine.
If I don't remember, who will?