How We Tell A Story....

 The best stories that we hear are the ones that we tell ourselves.  These are the most ordinary of stories, yet there is heroism, longing, sadness, contentment, justification and confirmation.  Those stories form from a lazy haze that works up a pattern upon the stencil we once had etched out on the table.  Each such story is but a version, just as history has always been, and those versions - of crystal haze - are the straws we cling to. If those straws form a bundle, we float under a warm, satisfying sun and – this is astonishing – we can stay that way for a long long time. 

The truth and a fact or two weave in and out of these stories, they have a place like the lamp beside our bed or the bread knife on the kitchen counter.  Elements of truth pick and arrange themselves along the strand of DNA, each a tiny weight of realism.  No story that we hear must be overweight, so the rest – what remains of truth and fact – is discarded into the neat recesses of conniving memory. 

The best stories that we hear are the ones that we tell ourselves.  All else, we have always known to be fiction.