up too early, i'm eating frozen fruit for breakfast, last night it snowed but it isn't quite pretty. i'm starting to think that we're all ineradicably tied to narrative. the other night i had dinner with an old friend, and it was not long at all before the conversation broke into a back-and-forth between retelling the story of everything that had happened between us and a weirdly proud recounting of everything that's happened since our relationship ended (as if this is something it merely decided to do one day, end, and we just had to listen to it and walk away). i was thinking at dinner about who i understand him as and who he understands me as, and i don't see how we could be anything but stories to each other at this point. when we knew each other better i think we still knew each other as stories, nice things we'd made up. then we got tired of making our bodies try to fit into all of those nice things, and realizing that we were tired made it clear how irrelevant that initial narrative of how and why we were bending together was to the actual bending. perhaps we never even knew each other better at all.
and the things we say to each other now, the breaking down of what's happened since july, all of that is just stories too. it all turns so minimal, being warped in the arc of a beginning and a middle and an end. telling stories and turning to stories the way we always do because they seem so easy, you invariably come to some kind of end. stories really are easy. i think i love stories because even if they're messy and full of holes they still end. and when they end, because they end, somehow or other they've turned sickly and wonderfully easy.