What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?

Do you trust me? The question is usually asked before an admission that such trust is misplaced.

I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.

What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?

I am an adult, but a damaged one.

We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.

Whatever enjoyment I might have had at the time would disappear overnight like snow melting on a warm roof.