Warp

I'd be happier, I think, if I could forget a little more. As it is, strands of memory slip and snag through time as I try to weave this story of us, continuous, a wholly unbroken pattern through my life. Each time leaves a little knot in my pretty picture, the unblemished version I tell people when I say we've been friends for so long that we've known each other longer than we haven't.

But remembering, I begin to see more clearly -- not the picture I was so focused on crafting -- but the pattern of these snags, how different we are. How far apart we've grown, and the impossibility of a pattern where we stayed close through nearly two decades.

Was the picture in my mind just a pretty fiction? It would be foolish to say the knots are reality and my weave wasn't. The knots only exist, after all, because I was intent on forcing the threads together. And would there be a pattern to the snags if I had forgotten where and when each one occurred? Perhaps this other picture only exists because I see it now. Perhaps if I forgot, we could simply let the threads of our lives mesh where they would, unravel where they chose. Perhaps if I forgot, I could stop seeking patterns where there's merely happenstance.