A story about stories about you.

You come up a lot in my stories.

The stories I tell myself in my mind.

Sometimes, too, the stories I tell other people.

You are part of my story.

But I don’t quite yet understand who you are in the story. Good? Bad?

I don’t ever know where the beginning is.

It always feels like a beginning; like I am starting again.

Starting again to feel it, to understand myself through you.

Is that why I tell these stories?

To know myself?

Are you just the allegory?

How does the story end?

Will we meet in the middle?

Is this the middle, the part where you and I intersect, and I finally understand that it’s always been about me even though I’ve been saying it’s always been about you?

Who is telling the story? From whose perspective do I see from?

Because the truth is there are many stories if we open that box. There is how you saw it and meant it, and there is how I did, how everyone around us did, and there is the understanding from the audience member that matters, too.

Some of the stories make me want to cry.

But I don’t go there for too long.

I don’t want to begin that because it may not end.

It’s a perpetual middle, that. Crying. Because it never fully happens start to end.

We are stuck then, there, in that happening. The story does end temporarily because I will distract myself and move on.

But it always gets picked up again at that place, at that temporary ending, which cannot be fully understood as an ending then, but is rather a temporary or perpetual beginning… a Beginning in waiting… waiting to continue.

I like the stories because sometimes I like who I can make you in them.

You are nicer.

You are kinder.

I remember the lessons you taught me, which have made me a more compassionate and better version of who I am and always have been.

I want to credit you.

I want to thank you. I do thank you. Thank you.

But it’s not always a true story. It goes in and around from fiction to non-fiction.

Fictitious.

I lie.

I like when I lie like that, though.

I lie more when I tell that version of you to other people. I can’t lie in the version I tell myself.

I have understanding and empathy for you in the version I tell myself.

Because I know the context. I know why and how you got there.

This means then that the author of the story is too the audience sometimes.

We tell ourselves stories. We live the life we wanted, the way things should have been often.

I wonder if you tell stories about me, too?

Who am I to you, in your story?

We are all just walking talking stories. Giving memories life through words. Sometimes real, sometimes not.

Who cares? Who fact checks?

This is the never-ending story. It doesn’t want to end, so it morphs and changes vantage points until we have heard and told the story in every single which way.

When I see you in these stories, you are easy to understand. It all seems so simple.

I see that you were growing, too. That you, too, didn’t have a sense of self and so you were reacting to life as it happened to you rather than willing your way into life. Even when you knew what was happening was wrong.

I know now that you had no formal education, no language in which to understand your own pain, your own thoughts and triggers.

I can understand the broken in you in these stories. You are easy to love broken. You are much harder for me to accept whole. Because you were wholly wrong and hurtful to me, allowing for things you knew were wrong but rationalized through anyway.

I can love you if you are broken. I can understand you if you are still broken. I cannot fathom the sum of your parts though if that was you as a whole.

Sometimes acting in evil but always acting in neglect. To yourself and to me.

I was just a child.

But so were you. Arrested development.

A flower not allowed to blossom or bloom or even die. Just arrested. Standstill. On perpetual pause. Forever in the middle of the moment it began and when it will inevitably come to an end.

We are stuck in the middle. Unable to go past the wall. Maybe afraid to, too.

I get solace from knowing this. It’s the only kind of atonement that is accessible to me.

Please forgive me.

I want to forgive you.

Foreshadow of the ending?

It’s taking a long time to get there, but the path seems clear. I can see it coming, as if it is eventual or inevitable. But is it? What if we really are stuck, though, on loop from start to middle, never able to get to the end?

What will retrospect look like in that end?

In my version, from my vantage point, peace is in the end; the end goal.

And Time is in the middle, in between the start and the end.

Tick. Tock.