This is phenomenal. Musings on loss and memory, and I enjoyed the ponderous way it's written.

I have heard so many stories, and told so many myself secondhand, that they crowd out the memories; the two twine up together, a text at once invented and true.

This was a "just trust me" rec from AHP, glad I took it.

I really enjoyed this essay but found myself editing it down! Just a tad too repetitive where I became aware of it as a “technique.”

10 Brilliant! 10

I think I listened and was nervous and reverent and didn’t say anything stupid; I think maybe for a minute I understood how important it all was, before I went downstairs and back outside and wrapped myself up in the native self-centeredness of being almost a teenager, of being so eager for the world as to insist on ignoring it entirely. I think she and my dad made fun of each other, and drank wine like they used to, and talked about the old days. I think everyone got drunk and I think I didn’t understand why everyone was in a better and better mood as the evening went on, but I think I was happy about it. I think that was when I knew these people mattered to me, that I wanted them to be in my life, and that I wanted to be in theirs, if I could ever be cool enough for it.

But maybe none of this happened, or maybe none of it happened like this. So much of this is guesses, so much of it is fictionalized and constructed. I have been inventing these people and their history so long that now I cannot pry apart the facts I do know, and the ones I have made up, filled in, or assumed. I have heard so many stories, and told so many myself secondhand, that they crowd out the memories; the two twine up together, a text at once invented and true. During those nights, or after them, my mom would gently make fun of my dad and his stories, how much of them was made up or exaggerated. She was definitely right, but maybe that was the point; love was creating a mythology, and building it bigger over the years, until it was large and bright enough to survive beyond the people in it, to carry them forward past themselves.

Here is the oldest, the most hackneyed and cliche, story, the one from movies and books and from years around the kitchen table, under the same antique lamp, bathed in the same stopped-clock glow: Sometimes your friends, through time and repetition, become your family. Sometimes this sort of friendship can, in the manner of family, be handed down generationally, persisting from one era to another, passing between hands and faces and decades. Sometimes people take root in one another’s hearts, and grow there as trees. Nothing that grows is permanent, but sometimes a person inhabits the world in a way that makes this seem like it could not possibly be true; surely some people must earn the right to live forever. Sometimes it is a Sunday, and there is bad news and nothing to do, and you bring over food and tell stories. Sometimes family and friends are the same, and sometimes grief is a party.