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Is This My Story? by Carl

8/20/2019

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Picture
​I am in stratospheric wanderlust. 
I don’t know what that means, the words are falling from the sky, not me.
Simple times simple things. 
Ancient statues unearthed in the wreckage of perfect wooden ships at the bottom of the black sea. 
I was never there, not that I remember anyway.
I don’t know which way were they going, or who wanted those statues.
But to pile all of that marble into a small wooden ship and head out across deep water,
reeks of oracles and gods.
I have been looking across the dark surface of the ocean at night.
There are so many stories out there on the water.
The moon utters words in splinters of silver against the volcanic edge of this island.
I suppose if I were to listen, I would hear it telling me to carve a massive chunk of rock
and try to paddle it over to Hilo.
I think I’ll leave THAT project for someone else.
Not that I’m afraid of the water. I just don’t like lifting shit.
In fact, eaten by sharks is high on my list of preferable ways to die.
The combination of violence and drowning would be fast and messy and . . . well,
I imagine struggling with a violent death would be the most vivid life experience.
I mean, if one indeed wants to Be Here Now.
My job at the Be Here Now Cafe was breakfast.
Smoking a ton of weed and cooking eggs with intense deliberation for hippies
​who got tired of waiting and wandered away. 
I was the last to leave. 
I made a sandwich and hit the road. 
I didn’t bother to lock the door behind me, I was eating the last piece of bread.
That place was a bad investment for somebody.
I called my Mom and asked her to send me my stereo so I could sell it for rent money.
She decided to keep it for herself and sent me two hundred bucks. 
Her rational was after depreciation and what it would have cost to ship it, that’s all it was worth.
Well, whatever, but the thing is, 
she would tell the story over and over about the time I was desperate and starving
and hustled her for cash.
It’s curious what happens to perception. 
Mental impressions re-interpreted over time. 
When the story changes, it effects the present, it alters the future.
It becomes a new truth. 
I think people change the story to fix the past. 
But I don’t think they know that’s what they’re doing. 
My subconscious is repairing my past in preparation for a new future. 
I see it happening all around me, and it effects me profound ways. 
When someone changes a story we share, 
I see the past begin to unravel, the future becomes murky, 
and friends transition into a reality we no longer share.
And stranger still, I sat at a table with an old friend while he told a tale of his wild youth. 
And I realized
the story he was telling was mine. 
It happened to me. 
He had been telling my story for so long, 
he stopped being the narrator, and had become the protagonist.
But what if it wasn’t my story either, maybe it belonged to someone I can’t remember.
When I was a boy, on a boat, in the middle of the sea, an old man said to me,
“Memory is a funny thing. I remember this morning, but last nights a little fuzzy.
And everything before that….
I’m not sure if it happened to me or if I saw it on TV.”
Thinking back on it, he might have said something else. 
But I’m gonna go with this version for now.
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