The Tender Lie of False Memory

I studied false memory, and at first, it felt purely clinical, just another demonstration of the mind’s profound and exquisite fragility. But the more I learned, the more it began to feel like a quiet tragedy. You see, memory is not a filing cabinet. It is not a fixed archive from which we extract facts, untouched by time. Memory is an act of reconstruction. It is a performance shaped by emotion, context, and need. Each time we recall a moment, we don’t retrieve it, we actually in way, we recreate it. Neural pathways light up not to replay, but to rebuild. And in this rebuilding, distortions slip in. Details shift. Edges blur. A smile becomes warmer. A silence becomes heavier. Words more tender. What once was factual becomes interpretive, then imaginative.

This is the architecture of false memory, not born from deceit, but from the mind’s innate vulnerability. The act of remembering itself alters what is remembered, like tracing over a drawing until the original sketch is forever changed. In trying to hold onto the past, we unknowingly rewrite it—sometimes with longing, sometimes with fear, and sometimes with a tenderness that never existed, but should have. We revise our memories with careful longing, rounding off the jagged contours of truth until they feel almost...almost kind.

Our memories lie to us—but they do so with gentleness.

Not out of malice, but mercy.

They lie like a mother telling her child the thunder won't return.

Like a lover saying, "I'll never leave," even as they reach for the door.

Like a father saying, “I’ll always protect you,” even when life pulls him far and fast.

Like a teacher smiling through exhaustion, saying, “You’re going to do great things,” when she knows the world may not be kind.

Like a friend promising, “We’ll never drift apart,” just before time teaches them otherwise.

The mind spares us from the brutality of remembering things exactly as they were.

Ever since I first studied false memory, I've wondered: can we create them deliberately? Could I craft a memory, because its absence of it is truly unbearable? Could I forge one last goodbye to someone who left too soon, or never truly arrived at all? Could I conjure the sound of your voice saying my name as if it still held meaning? Can I return to Seville—not in person, but in feeling? Can I walk its narrow streets with you once more, our shadows stretching long and untouched by time? Could I expand that week, that single sunlit week, into a memory vast enough to dwell within?

Why should it matter whether it happened? If the grief is real, if the ache is real, if the tenderness I feel when I remember cuts like a knife—isn't that its kind of truth? Perhaps what we imagine out of love rings truer than what we lived in indifference.

Perhaps a false memory, crafted from longing, speaks more truth than the cold facts of the past. Because what is chosen..what is shaped by yearning..is never neutral.

It is sacred.

It is necessary.

And so I ask, not in the language of empirical observation but in the intimate way of yearning: can I create a memory from the raw materials of my longing? Not because it adheres to some factual timeline, but because its absence threatens to unravel the fabric of who I am? Is it such a transgression to carefully craft a version of you who chose to remain. So before the yearning devours what’s left of me, let me ask again, softly, desperately:

Can I make a memory

to someone—

even if that someone

only ever lived

Inside the warmth of my remembering?