Narrarator

I'm beginning to lose sleep over my own story. Beginning to wake at 3am and wonder if it is my story. Is it mine to tell? Am I good enough to tell it? Am I reliable? Competant? What exactly does this job require. I scan my qualifications and they always appear to fall short. I'm trying to move toward a place where I can tell it and love it like my favorite stories. Where I can forget that autobiographies don't sell. No one believes truth unless it's sheathed in multi-colored fiction. In my favorite story, it would be clear from the beginning that my wound is geography, that it is also my anchorage, my port of call.

If I were writing my favorite story, the one that took me furthest as a child, my mother would've believed in the dreams of animals. She would tell me that bees dreamed of honey and that the osprey dreamed of slow-motion herring. She wouldn't dream of nights without my father. She wouldn't wake to his ghost beside her and dull-edged chopping knives sweaty beneath her pillow. She would've raced us at dusk to watch the moon rise, and I would've believed she had brought it there, just for me.

She would not have woken my father late nights over hooting owls and she would not have been met by his warm sudden fingers milking her smoothe throat. If this were my favorite story, it would be an autobiography, my story, not my father's. It would not tell of fear or blood. It would be a book on tape, abridged. A lullabye. I would be an only child rocked in the lap of my family, it would take place deep in southern Mexico, or on a cool, rainy hillside north of Washington state. In a warm place, free of drafts. If this were my story, the end would have come much more quickly than it does.