There’s a scene in a movie of a man dumping piles of books into an incinerator. It’s located in the basement of a library, a strange place for an incinerator, indeed.

But the library is a metaphor for his mind. And the burning books are memories he wants to eliminate.

We both know it’s not that easy to remove a memory from your mind. They’re experiences embedded deep into our brains. Some are forever etched into its fabric. For better or worse, removing them would be difficult.

But memories can be changed. Memories can be manipulated. Like the way you drive by your childhood home and realize it was much smaller than you recall.

One of my earliest memories was standing on the stairs of my childhood home watching a truck pull out of the driveway. The snapshot memory is seen from behind me further up the stairs. I remember the color of the carpet, the way I was standing – it’s so clear I could sketch the image in my mind.

But in reality, the window in my memory didn’t look out over our driveway. And the truck I remember never visited our home. On top of that, I would have been less than two years old. It’s highly unlikely I would have been standing alone on the stairs.

Memories are funny things. They don’t always mirror reality. They’re distorted by perspective and time.