About

Over the course of several years, I’ve told multiple versions of this story.  As a love letter when asked about my tattoos.  As an apology when asked about my scars.  As an adventure when asked about my life.  And, once, as an explanation when asked about my sister.

No two iterations have been told the same way, and certainly never truthfully.  Never the full truth, anyway.  Besides, who would even believe me?  so, each retelling has had its own aggrandizement, its own obfuscations, abridgments, editorializations, and exaggerations.

Now, perhaps for my own sanity, I’ve taken the time to sit down and recount the whole story, without embellishment (though, with certain necessary omissions; a pubescent brain is not always such a polite and socially acceptable mine of publishing gold).

In one of her more lucid moments, Marlin came to me, and together we found old journals, kept, as children keep their written thoughts, for posterity.  Inserted into bound and ringed notebooks were dusty scraps of paper with half remembered scrawls taken as footnotes when the horrors we faced were too exhausted to allow for anything approaching coherent thought.

Isabelle, generally too busy for us these days, even found time to provide me with such scribbled remembrances as I’d requested.  She had even, to my immense surprise, managed to dig up a box of my brother’s effects.  With everything we’d collectively discovered, we pieced together something resembling a chronological order of our lives to the point where stability and (relative) sanity began to reign.

Where the pages were torn and the fugue of years past clouded events, I’ve done my best to fill in the blanks (of which there are but a few).

Not that it really matters.  You won’t believe a word of what I am about to tell you.

No one ever does.