No Story

For me there is no narrative, no story within a story, no life story that encompasses all stories. When death comes the narrative I have been retelling myself will become a set of images, a small bundle of moments, a memory of a memory. I recall killing a murdering bandit chased him all over North Thailand, The satisfaction of putting two .22 Magnums slugs into his head after he surrendered. I could write a book about that, detail and narrate, perhaps elaborate and fudge all the circumstances that led to that moment, but none of it matters only the look in his eyes as the lights went out, that’s the image that stays. Of my first boyhood crush only the one image remains, her sour look seen through a teardrop. My father holding his arms aloft after the chemotherapy A victory salute two days before he died in the hospice. Of course there are other images, but there is no story worth reinventing. Each image is a fractal an incomplete mosaic of a whole, though clearer than any story that could be set to paper as a word-web of truth and fiction. When all that matters is what we see in a broken mirror then that splintering will speak for us not any story narrated by our own slyly embellishing ghost writer.