the process of telling a story, any story, only puts it farther from the truth of the experience, whatever that is. Here are my stories, embellished by my own imagination (sometimes without my consent), picked over by my memory, forced into a timeline that will make sense to someone who has not lived them and has not known the characters, forced into a plot that does not exist, played to an audience I did not have. Here are his stories, told by someone who was perhaps the most biased reporter you will ever find. Here are the stories of the people I know, ravaged by time and retelling and the fact I never lived them in the first place. It doesn’t make sense to pretend that this book contains the truth.
Here is a story I stole: the pastor had a daughter, a few years younger than me. When I was in love with her brother, I would sometimes spend the night with her, curled up in her bed, hyper-aware of his presence in the house. She had three brothers but no sisters, and was painfully eager for a sister of any kind. At nights, she whispered how she hoped I would marry her brother and become her sister, and I was thrilled. I was in love for the very first time, or what passes for being in love between very young people, and I loved imagining our future together: a collection of adoring in-laws only sweetened the deal. And she was very happy to imagine this shared life with me. Our friendship didn’t survive my falling out of love with her brother. I didn’t give her a chance to stay friends. When her brother and parents began lashing out at me, I didn’t want to be around her. Because it wasn’t really a relationship, it wasn’t really a breakup, and there wasn’t really a way for me to say I don’t want this anymore. I wasn’t old enough to understand how to extricate myself gracefully, or even to grasp what I had been committed to. But in the pastor’s daughter’s story, I’m the villain. I lied to her. I hurt her brother. I disrespected her family. And I was a bad friend, and I didn’t act like a sister. And she’s right. That’s true.
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