Once upon a time, a memory was formed. The whole family was there to see, hear, smell and feel it. Each of them knew that it was something they would never forget, having seen it so sharply right there in front of them. Just as they believed, not one of them forgot what happened, they would turn it over in their minds at night, trying to make sense of what they had seen, what they had felt. But the family didn’t talk about the memory. "It belongs to me.” thought every single one of them. “Nobody else has a right to touch it. it lives in my mind, so it is mine.” They nurtured their memory, giving it plenty of light and attention, keeping it in silent darkness, or shouting at it in the privacy of their own room. Years passed. the family saw each other rarely, for reasons we do not need to know. Though each was busy with their own lives they kept the memory in a corner of their mind, bringing it out to exercise often, or chaining it up to the wall to keep themselves safe. One day the family talked. The memory was there in all their words. They quarrelled, as each person's memory was different, nothing they remembered was the same size or shape or texture or volume. The daughter said it was silent, smothering and huge. The mother saw it as wide and wailing. To the father it was thin as shadows and to the son it was a concrete wall, impossible to climb. They asked a wise woman what to do. she said; "You all have a piece of the memory, your own fragment. all of them are real, they are just each seen from a different angle." So the family met again and tried to fit the memory together, to see what it looked like and find out the truth for once and for all. But concrete crushed the shadows, the wailing screamed through the silence, none of the parts would fit. The whole fractured thing was huge, so much bigger than anyone remembered. They returned to the wise woman, demanding an explanation. She said "I told you that you each had a part of the memory but I didn't tell you that they would still fit together. You’ve kept your own piece alive for so long, brought it out to the light, or kept it in ink-darkness, so the part of the memory each of you had grew and warped and twisted and turned in different ways. The pieces would never fit, not now. This is the way of memories. None of you are right and none of you are wrong. You will never know the true shape of the memory, you will just have to learn to live with that." So at last that is just what they did. The memory got smaller, smaller still, until one day no one thought of it at all.
