The memory was a happy one, but faded at the edges. Like a photograph that had been handled a few too many times. And look at it often, she did. This one bright moment that had stuck with her. When there’d been a happy family enjoying a beautiful day in the park.

Happiness was fleeting, something she’d learned the hard way over the years. So to have this place to retreat back to, one of very few places that brought her a sense of emotional warmth, helped tremendously. She can never stay too long here before things snap back into focus.

This is her memory. That much is true. Yet, she’s not the little girl swinging happily from the arms of her parents. No, she’s the little girl hiding in the hedges watching, yearning for that kind of connection. There’s a brief moment she thinks of standing, possibly even approaching the nice-looking family. But she’s already been jaded enough to know getting any closer can lead to hurt or pain no matter how nice someone might look. So she’d stayed, watching with longing eyes until the three were completely out of sight.

In the years after, when she revisits the memory, she tweaks things sometimes. Each one distorts the memory a bit more, ghosts of those other frames bleeding into the picture of what actually happened. The worst mirages are the times she’d tried to approach them. And even in her dreams, they run away from her. The best are the times she’d done something even more dangerous: deleting the other little girl and taking her place. They made her happiest in the moment, all the attention on her and not a nameless girl who probably had so many happy memories. They bled together. Wherever she was now, the girl likely didn’t even remember this random trip to the park.

The drop was harder after spinning the memory to fit that narrative. Guilt hung heavy for stealing another little girl’s family, if only in dreams. And it was impossible not to have memories of her real childhood stir up when she finally pulls out of that sweet dream.