Is Memory Fake

There was a mirror in the psychologist's restroom. Lin Shen glanced at himself while washing his hands—sunken eye sockets, chapped lips, the face of someone who had convinced himself of something for too long. He leaned closer to the mirror, trying to find evidence of her existence in his own eyes. But there was only himself in the mirror. A self who had always been alone.

The couch in the clinic was very soft. When Lin Shen sat down, his whole body sank halfway into it.

The psychologist was Dr. Zhou, in his forties, wearing square-framed glasses, with a smile that carried a professional warmth. On one side of his desk sat an hourglass, fine sand steadily falling from the upper chamber into the lower one. Lin Shen stared at the hourglass for a long time, feeling it looked like time turned upside down.

He never thought he would be sitting here. Architectural design was his entire world—lines, proportions, load-bearing structures—everything had standards to refer to. Until this morning, when he realized he couldn't even produce a single photo of the two of them together.

"Mr. Lin," Dr. Zhou closed the medical record, "you said just now that you had been in a relationship with a woman named Su Wan for two years. But now everyone says there is no such person, including your best friend."

"Correct."

"And all her things have disappeared. Photos, clothes, WeChat account. Everything that could prove she existed is gone."

Lin Shen shifted his body, pressing his back deeper into the couch—an instinctive move he made whenever entering any room, finding solid support behind him. "Not everything. There was a sticky note, still on the fridge last night. Her handwriting."

"And the sticky note?"

"It turned into a blank piece of paper this morning."

Dr. Zhou didn't look surprised. He pushed his glasses up, picked up the thermos on his desk, took a sip of water, and then said, "Mr. Lin, what I'm about to say may not be pleasant to hear."

Lin Shen said nothing.

"Your current condition has a clinical explanation—Fabricated Memory Syndrome. Long-term high pressure, living alone, lack of emotional needs—in certain circumstances, these can cause the brain to 'fill in' a memory to fill a void." Dr. Zhou's speaking rhythm was steady, as if reading an objective examination report. "Your brain may have projected an ideal partner into your daily life. Those details—the sticky note, the slippers, the photos—were all constructed by you."

"What about the chat records?" Lin Shen said. "I have over a hundred chat records on my phone, every one of them sent by her."

"Chat records could be sent from yourself to yourself. There are many ways to run dual instances of WeChat nowadays."

Lin Shen felt his molars clench. "Then what about her lying next to me every night—was that tactile sensation something I imagined too?"

Dr. Zhou's hourglass had completed one cycle. He turned it over, and the fine sand began falling again. "Mr. Lin, I know this is hard for you to accept. But have you considered another possibility—if Su Wan in your memory felt so real to you, why are you sitting in my office right now trying to prove she existed?"

This question silenced Lin Shen for a long time. The sand in the hourglass was falling grain by grain. He listened to the sound of his upper teeth clicking against his lower ones.

"Because everyone keeps saying there's no such person," he finally spoke, his voice half a degree lower than before.

"Perhaps everyone is not wrong."

Lin Shen stood up. He walked to the window, parted the blinds with his fingers. On the street below, people were coming and going. A girl in a gray hoodie with a ponytail looked like Su Wan from behind. He watched for three seconds. She turned at the intersection, her profile exposed. It wasn't her.

He closed the blinds and turned around.

"Dr. Zhou, if I really made all this up—then why am I still looking for her? If I fabricated her for two years, now that I know the truth, shouldn't the story be over?"

Dr. Zhou paused. "Fabricated memories are not stories. They are a real experience. Just like when you're dreaming, you don't know you're dreaming."

Lin Shen didn't say anything more. He thanked the doctor, picked up his coat, and walked out of the clinic. The corridor was long, his footsteps echoing on the tile floor one by one. He stopped when he passed the restroom, went in, and splashed water on his face under the faucet. The water was very cold, just as cold as the time he'd splashed his face last night.

He braced his hands on the edge of the sink, head down, water dripping from the tip of his nose.

The person in the mirror looked overwhelmingly tired—not the kind of exhaustion from working overtime, but a hollowness from deep within. He focused on his own pupils, black and deep. He thought: If Su Wan really is just a figment of my imagination, then what kind of person am I? Someone so lonely they had to create a person to keep them company?

The thought made him shiver.

He shook the water off his hands, walked out of the restroom, and stood for a while by the vending machine at the end of the corridor. The machine's light flickered on and off, the low-frequency hum especially clear in the empty hallway. He reached into his pocket for coins, but his fingers touched a hard corner—the access card Su Wan had given him. Pure white card face, nothing on it.

He pulled it out, rubbed it between his fingers twice, then put it back.

It was already past noon when he got home. He kicked off his shoes, walked into the living room, and sat on the sofa for about ten minutes doing nothing. Then he stood up and walked to the bedroom.

He knelt on the floor, starting from the nightstand, running his fingers inch by inch along the wall beside the head of the bed. He didn't know what he was looking for. Maybe a scratch, maybe traces of adhesive left from tape Su Wan had put up, maybe anything that could prove another person had once lived here.

The wall was very white. That kind of white from construction work, flawless. When his fingers reached the corner, his fingernail caught on a small gap in the wall surface. Not a gap—a loose piece of cement. He picked at it again, and a fingernail-sized fragment of wall surface came off, revealing a deeper crevice behind it.

He reached his finger inside and felt paper.

The paper was thin. He carefully pulled it out. It was a small scrap of paper, less than two centimeters on each side, edges torn unevenly. One side was stained with blue paint, dried thoroughly but still vibrant—that shade of blue he recognized. It was Prussian Blue, the color Su Wan loved most when painting skies. The other side had half a Chinese character.

He leaned in to look. It was the right half of the character "Wan."

He held the scrap in his palm. His hands were shaking. Not from excitement—it was the kind of trembling of "I finally found evidence but I'm afraid it will disappear in the next second." He quickly reached for his phone with his other hand—not in his pocket, it was on the coffee table in the living room. He held the scrap carefully, not daring to take big steps, afraid that walking too fast would create air currents that might blow the paper away.

Got the phone—unlocked it—opened the camera—aimed at the scrap.

The moment he pressed the shutter, he saw it through the lens.

White.

He lowered the phone. The scrap in his palm still had its color—blue paint, half the character "Wan." He looked at the photo on the phone. The photo showed pure white, not even the texture of the paper, just meaningless white pixels.

He took another photo. Same result. Third. Fourth. Every single one was white.

He brought the scrap close to his eyes. Light hit it from the side; the fiber texture of the paper was clearly visible, pigment particles embedded between the fibers. This wasn't a piece of plastic, not an illusion he'd imagined—his eyes could see it, his fingers could feel the rough texture of the paper, the slight bumps on the paint surface.

But the phone couldn't capture it. As if there was a filter between the lens and the scrap, filtering out all reality.

He turned the phone over to check the lens—clean, no screen protector, no scratches. He held the scrap up to his own eyes again—blue, very clear. Then aimed it at the phone lens—the viewfinder showed white.

This was a selective erasure. Targeted. It was bypassing his eyes but targeting every recording method other than himself.

An indescribable feeling surged in his chest—not anger, not fear, but a bone-chilling clarity. Someone was erasing her. Not casually, but methodically, layer by layer—starting with other people's memories, then photos, then the traces she'd left behind. And his memory was the last and hardest layer to erase.

He placed the scrap on the coffee table, pressed it down with his notebook, then went to the kitchen to pour a glass of water. The sound of water filling the glass was dull. He walked back with the glass, sat down in front of the coffee table, and lifted the notebook—

The scrap was still there.

He breathed a sigh of relief. Then he saw the edges of the scrap—the paint was fading inward, like ice slowly melting. First, the outermost fibers began turning white, then the strokes of the half-character "Wan" broke apart, and finally the first stroke of "Wan," the horizontal line at the bottom of the "Sun" radical.

He pressed his hand on the paper, trying to push the color back. It was useless. The paper continued turning white under his fingers, the white area spreading like a drop of water falling on rice paper, expanding outward from the center. Within ten seconds, the entire scrap had turned into a pure white piece of paper with uneven edges.

He turned the paper over. White.

Turned it back. White.

He placed the now-white scrap next to yesterday's blank sticky note—two pieces of pure white paper, one on the left, one on the right. One was yesterday's evidence, the other today's.

He stared at these two pieces of paper for a long time. Then he stood up and walked to the wall where he had found the scrap. He knocked horizontally across the wall surface with his knuckles, reaching every inch. When he reached the third row, the sound changed—not solid wall, a hollow spot.

He pried off that whole section of wall surface. Behind it was a small cavity. Inside the cavity was something—a roll of paper bound with a rubber band.

He pulled it out and unrolled it.

It was a watercolor painting. Palm-sized, depicting a young man sitting on a sofa, holding a pencil, drawing blueprints. The lines of the man's profile were carefully rendered—the curve of the jaw, a small patch of unshaven stubble behind his ear. More than half of the painting was stained blue, as if the painter had accidentally knocked over a cup of brush-rinsing water, or perhaps—it had been smudged while being hurriedly hidden away.

Lin Shen recognized the person in the painting.

The person in the painting was himself. In the bottom right corner, a small sun was drawn. Beside the sun, written in pencil so fine it was almost unreadable, were two characters: "Painted by Su Wan."

He held the painting, standing before the cavity for a long time. The air conditioner's cool breeze blew on the back of his neck, but he didn't feel cold at all.

He wasn't crazy. She had indeed existed. She had lived here, hidden a painting behind this wall. The painting was still here—even if the sticky note had disappeared, even if the access card was blank, even if everyone's memories had been erased—this painting was still here.

He rolled the painting back up, tightened the rubber band, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his coat, against his heart.

His phone rang on the coffee table. It was Gu Yang.

"Deep, you home? I'm off work, brought two portions of dumplings. Be there soon."

Lin Shen glanced at the hole in the wall. He tried to press the broken wall surface back into place, but it wouldn't hold, crumbling to the floor.

"Okay," he said.

He hung up and sat on the sofa, his hand pressed against the inner pocket of his coat. The hard corner of the painting pressed into his palm, like a second heartbeat.

From outside the door came the chime of the elevator arriving at his floor.