Immortality

"You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end." -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Words do not hold a story captive. When you speak aloud your voice sort of dissipates into the air like breath on a snowy evening, so words on a page do seem pretty permanent by comparison. They're not, though. They only last as long as the page, as the book, as the technology that holds them. Plenty of words have been lost in time. It's alright, though, because the story exists in someplace a lot more permanent than words.

Actions do not hold a story captive. By the time you're telling the story the actions are already done anyway, the coat is already drying on the rack and the storm has passed. What actually happened doesn't really matter anymore. You can't remember it, anyway. As O'Brien says, when things happen sometimes your immediate reaction is to look away and then to look back. You've only got your eyes to go on, or the feel of your feet dragging in the snow. But the story can feel things without the action.

Facts do not hold a story captive. The dead do not have to remain dead and the living do not have to be who they say they are. The author may only know so much, but the story expands beyond that, reaching out into the night, into the heads of other people who are trudging their way through the world, or once did, a long, long time ago.

A story is free because it can be whatever it needs to be. Wherever there is a willing mind, it exists. It is the collective memory of people, or their collective imagination and reimagination where the facts grow dim and potential reaches out and quietly takes your hand. Stories can pass from person to person, sometimes with no connection except the same place or the same sky, shifting into different forms and helping different people living their different lives for centuries and centuries of storms.

It retells itself without the need for words or actions or facts. Sometimes situations repeat, or pain, or happiness, and there is the potential to reimagine what will happen next. The only thing it needs is thought, or at least for us to understand it, and that is the most beautiful connection of humankind in the world.

Of course, who knows. Maybe the story isn't even held captive by the human mind. Maybe only shades of it's paradoxical truth are piercing our brains and hearts as time goes on. Maybe the world itself tells the story, even alone in the snow where no footsteps have ever fallen, or even been imagined.