warped in the telling
So, there's this story I wrote a long time ago, and it starts with a meteor falling on the protagonist's house--or, more precisely, by the time the narrative begins the meteor has already fallen she's on the bus to Chicago to crash with an ex whose bridges she has long since burned. It's a story about the improbable impossible beauty of being alive, of how many amazing coincidences it takes for anything to happen at all, of being unable to move on from the past, of being unable to forgive yourself for the things everyone else has. I had most of a novel written, a big and sprawling text by my standards, all weird and meandering and full of these moments that were, to my mind, absolute poetry.
Then the netbook I was writing it on died, and when I took it into the nearby laptop repair shop and asked if the data was recoverable, they took my $50 diagnostic fee and, after some diagnostic, said "we don't know, give us $200 and we'll find out." I lost a lot of things on that netbook, but that story always haunted me.
I retold a lot of elements of this story in the weird, indulgent year-long project on my old blog, which was inspired by Jason Webley's Counterpoint album--twelve songs, twelve keys, each song with a thematic counterpoint six songs later. I gave each month a theme and each theme a counterpoint. It was bizarre and indulgent and probably a better work overall than the story I'd lost, but I still felt that loss.
Anyway. I was digging through my file backups--I have those, now, largely because of this incident--to help someone out with a project, and I found a text file containing a version of the story I don't remember. It's not the main one. It doesn't get past the intro. But it's an attempt to retell that story, with some different framing, some attempt to give it new life rather than simply reconstructing what was lost.
It's full of these little anecdotes from my life, stories that happened that just felt so perfect I had to put them in something. Or maybe it's something else. There are stories in there I've never told as stories that happened to me. I've kept them at the remove of fiction, these weird little moments that I'm not sure I ever really understood.
The last bit of text in that story, after our narrator spends some time reflecting on the stories we tell people when they ask what we've been up to for the past several years, is this:
The important moments, the slow realizations and the flashes of insight, are never in those stories, no matter how much we want to tell about them. I put them in songs, though.
I can see, in the narrator, all of the weird manic brokenness that is me; the accumulated weight of years has quenched her spark; life has dealt her many a blow that you can't walk away from unscathed. I'm no longer the person I was when I wrote that, or, yes, the person I wrote that about, but I still carry that person with me.
It's funny, in retrospect. That story was intensely personal in a way I'm not sure I realized at the time. By the time it became part of this bigger, grander project, it had become, well, a bigger, grander project. The protagonist from that version of the story isn't even the one that was "meant" to be me, by the time that rolls around. As with all stories, it warped in the telling, became something new and strange; I don't regret that. But I wish that older version, so raw and personal, had survived.