Penpal

by Dathan Auerbach

The events of our lives unfold linearly, but in the mental reel of these past experiences, most of the frames that haven’t been completely stolen by time are left distorted and blurred by it. When you try to reconstruct

the series, you find that it isn’t complete, but maybe this never really bothers you, because you can’t miss what you don’t remember.

We want so badly to be happy – to live the kinds of lives that we always hoped we’d live – that we give gifts to ourselves by remembering things not as they were, but as we wish they were.

fact, if we remembered every detail of every day, we might find ourselves so fixated on the past that most of our memories would be of us

Our minds work hard to avoid dissonance – if we hold a belief strongly enough, our minds will forcefully reject conflicting evidence so that we can maintain the integrity of our understanding of the world.