Something happened. And I want to tell you about that something, only I’m having trouble working out how to tell you what I have learned from that something, without the other people who were around being able to read anything into it. Do you know what I mean? Even though I have separated myself and don’t want to make any judgement – good or bad – about anyone else, just by reflecting on myself, it will appear as if I’m reflecting on other people too. Get it?
I’m particularly sensitive about it all, because in the aftermath of that something, I said something hoping to have one effect, but causing another. Tried to do a good thing, but made things worse.
Words are such tricky things.
Sometimes you think they are diamonds, but they are really shards of glass.
And howcome they sometimes don’t reveal their form until they have left you and reached someone else?
I suppose it’s the kind of experience that, at some time or another, will wrap itself in a cloak of fiction and present itself to the world. But I’m not in fiction-writing mode at the moment. I’m doing memoir.
Which, of course, causes me to reflect constantly on which parts of which of my stories I tell. I’m at the point now where I’m comfortable with the lines I’ve drawn. It’s about me and my dad and my mum, and sometimes me and my grandfather, so I’m trying not to mention other people at all, though the mister gets a guernsey, and the lads do feature. That means that it’s incomplete in some senses, that my parents are represented only from my point of view. But in memoir, as I’ve discovered, all of those decisions are a trade-off of some kind of another.
Anyhoo, I’d best be getting on if anything at all is going to be finished anytime soon.
This is really only half a blog post, isn’t it?