"That's Not the Story," short story excerpt

Thursday 9/25/25

You write a story and you work at it.

You lavish it with care. What you believe is your every thought it needs and deserves.

You live with the story. For years, possibly. Seeing it inside of your head. Speaking with it. Going away with it. Sending it messages. Checking in on it. Making sure it has everything it requires.

You're committed.

Whenever you look to the spot where you expect to see the story, you find it standing there in the same clothes, like a uniform.

It’s that story. As much that story as anything has been anything.

Okay?

Then, maybe without meaning to, late in a day that has all but kept saying, I still haven’t ended and you can’t make me, you catch this glimpse, an instantly suffusing eyeful, of the knowledge, the awareness, the truth, that that’s not the story.

You wrote it wrong. You spent all that time doing it wrong. Being wrong.

The story that the story should be is actually closer to the opposite of the story that was. In approach. Style. Tone. Structure. Perspectives. Shape. Who's doing the narrating. The title. The angle from which the story comes.

Most people can’t stomach the idea of lost years, but more so in their heart than anywhere else, where the hammers of courage are often piled conspicuously, tormentingly in the corner, dusty from disuse, looking heavier than ever before.

They don’t want to say, "I fucked up. I pissed away the time, that portion of my earthly allotment,” believing instead that they must remain capable of pointing to structures standing in the space that now belongs to the past, rather than only a field where once there’d been buildings or no buildings as of yet.

They’re terrified the years weren’t what they were regarded as, even though they’ve passed regardless. But at least the previous occupant of those years could look back upon them, in their curated form, and say, “See?”

To whom, though, would they be speaking, besides themselves?

Just like people don't want to allow that they've wasted their life or a section within. They'd rather keep wasting it than blow the whistle, admit that this isn’t the game, and start playing something else.

The new start of the correct way is perceived as and feared for not being situated far enough from that person’s still-advancing ending. The spacing isn’t right. It’s as if they’ve been shortchanged—or shortchanged themselves—what is due to everyone as part of the deal of being alive, and now it’s going to be harder, when it was hard enough already. The child who comes of age and leaves the orphanage is presented with a set of dress clothes for an interview for the job they’ll need, but your bundle was lost chasing after a ball gone into the bushes while everyone else retained theirs.