I have blanks. Some huge areas, that when I look back, there is nothing. Sometimes that frightens me. Was it the wine, or is it much worse, like the early onset of some memory disease. Some little prompt tells me it might be something else entirely.
Whatever it is, it’s got me thinking about where I am standing. Every time I write, I tell a story, and in every story, I ask myself what is the truth? A story gives me a filter, a frame to consider events, and I simply stand at the edge of water, on the safe sand, casting metaphors like a fisherman.
Does a narrator choose where to stand?
What I would like to be able to do is pinpoint, when everything started to change. I keep looking for something that I missed, berating as that might seem, I am sure I would have seen it, but I never find the protagonist’s elusive fatal flaw. I just get a string of unconnected coincidences, that jumble into a collection, like fish stuck in a rockpool after a high tide.
What am I doing standing here?
Today, I am on the bank looking for answers, sifting around the pools with my net. A clear horizon, sun on my face, trying to process, trying to write, pretending I can write. A mermaid with legs, it’s a conundrum what to do about shoes.
There is a story here, I’m just not in a position to tell it.
So, working out where to stand becomes the hardest thing to do. Am I a victim, or have I made myself one? Was it as bad as I think I remember, and what happens if I wanted to go back. The last one is always easily dismissed.
Things now are so infinitely better.
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