“True.”

H,

It is true that as you grow older former times fold into romantic history or sullen tragedy. The history you connect with in joy becomes sweeter because it is gone. The darkness you cannot take becomes this haunting ghost that follows you around. We are not all the same and it shows in this; how we deal with the history and tragedy of our own lives. In dealing with these two strands that form our being we become more or less true or untrue.

If we are untrue then we construct a great dam against feeling the negative aspects of growing into ourselves. We let in all the good stuff. We reinvent the evil stuff. We make unicorns out of dragons and force back the dark into a single blot that we can wash away. We write fiction. We act like a character in the great play. We become heroes.

If we are true we carry this heavy weight of being. Living, working, trying to carve meaning out of daily life becomes the task of our age. We are upset and closed off when the tide of evil comes. We need the talking cure, the listening ear and perhaps, the light of God. There is no time for fiction. We are in the great play and it may go on forever.

I am not sure we are wholly true and untrue. We mix and match depending on memory or experience. There are times when you would tell me a story about our growing up together and it would seem so stale, so free of what I felt in that real moment and so much more like a fairy tale that I would call you a liar. My own version was no better. It was dark and nihilistic and there was no good in anything. Perhaps the truth was somewhere in the middle.

Perhaps in learning to listen to each other without judgement we may stumble upon what is true.