Imperfect recall: what if?

Memories are unreliable chroniclers of facts: sometimes bold,  other times, hazy. Almost always however, they are shape-shifting, shimmery little mirages thrown up by your mind to appease, humor, or...mislead. Are the hazy ones hazy because they are incomplete ? The bold ones trying too hard to convince you? Which ones are true and which ones your own fanciful creations? What do you believe if Belief itself can be trickery?

I read somewhere that the shocking part of Recall is that only a small portion of even our vividest memory is based on actual, retrieved facts. The rest is made up of intelligent cerebral interpolations to fill in the empty spaces and impart the right flavor. Poetic license of the Soul, if you will.

For instance, I know for sure that years ago, my brother really did build a small paper fire in our bedroom in Nairobi. To cook rice in a metal Smarties (like M&Ms) tube behind the bed.
I am less certain however that the rice tasted as creamy, fluffy and yummy as I remember it.

It's much more likely that my mom busted our covert ops at the first whiff of smoke and charred tin.

My brother was 8, I was 3 and I am told that in those days, nothing good had ever come of complete silence from us for over 10 minutes. Our harried and over-worked young mother was in a perpetual state of alertness. She had been primed, among other adventures, by returning to the kitchen one day, after hours of washing clothes in the bathtub. She found my brother lovingly lining up jam jars on the window sill. They were teeming with tadpoles and young frogs he'd 'rescued' from his school drain. She also found me about to start on a baby bottle full of his assorted pond life. My brother's scheme to get me off the bottle was a brilliant, if unacknowledged, success as a few short screams later (not all of them came from me) I was permanently cured of the bottle habit.

Anyway. The point is, she'd developed eyes in the back of her head and a 6th, 7th and 8th sense for what we were up to at any given time.

I'm not surprised though that I remember the taste of that forbidden snack (that never was) so well. We probably came way from the episode with smarting bottoms and sinister promises of our father's fury when he returned later in the evening. That last part was pure bluster, by the way: he was really a lamb.

Yet, our exciting adventure could not possibly end on such a mundane, forgettable note in the annals of my personal history. I'm guessing that history got quietly revised when I recalled our 'good old days' and the episode of the Smarties tube. My brain overwrote the anticlimactic moments with more fitting notes of triumph.

So how do you trust your memories, ever? Not so worrisome with the joyful ones: exaggeration isn't necessarily bad if it stays true to spirit. But how about the dark nasties that everyone harbors in the inner recesses of their hearts?

What if you were to discover one day that the resentment that you feel towards someone has been conflated by your mind? That the anger towards them has been swollen by a hardworking brain filling in the gaps or replacing compassion with angry notes befitting your hurt feelings? Maybe the person's trespass was real but contextually much smaller than it's long residence in your memory has made it?

What if every hurt inside you is only fractionally real?
What if with just one stroke of acceptance, you can banish the majority of your hurts?

What if?

Oyon-isms:
5.5 years old.
To his Uncle Mark as he walked through the door, "Hi Uncle Mark. I just had a tantrum. I cried, yelled and whined for things that were not right. It's called a tantrum and it's not good .Want to see my new 'Lion King' book?"