This is an absolutely true story.
The girl fluctuated between serious and silly, each story building upon the last, a tower of tales offering a glimpse into her true mood. There were poems and glimpses; looks behind the curtain of her psyche that moved me closer to understanding her. She said, “I don’t like writing true stories. When you write down the truth it leaves your mind. Thats why I always hold a little something back so that a piece of the story is still with me in my memories.”
I didn’t want to believe her. My feelings ran opposite of her own. I told stories to never forget. I wrote them down in the moment and sometimes after I’d had a chance to reflect, the latter creating stories more built on the fantasy of what should have happened versus the reality that did. The stories I wrote down were always based on the real. I told her that even my fiction was real in some small way. Either a relationship, or emotion, or a taste at the back of my tongue, all of it originated from a life lived.
“I couldn’t do that. If I told all my stories I’d be empty. There would be nothing left of me that wasn’t on the page.”
Nothing that belonged to only her, maybe, but wasn’t that the true point? Didn’t she want to echo the way I wanted to echo. I wanted to be heard so that my experiences could affect someone else going through the choices I went through.
“But then they are no longer your own.”
I asked her what an empty version of herself looked like and imagined bone and black space floating beneath her skin. I imagined a head that pleaded for stories, for shards of memory to orient herself in a past that led her to a present and into the future. I imagined all of these things but said, “Maybe you’re right in one sense. The memories I hold to tightest I’ve never shared on paper. Not because I was afraid to lose them, but because I had nothing to do with them in story.”
I feared she was like me; she was a writer deep down but was afraid that story was something more than she was capable of and that her experience was not the ephemeral human sort but the stuff of bad nickelodeon and made for TV lifetime dramas. I call that life fuel, and she claims that fuel burns until nothing is left but the dust of the memories that powered your words.