You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

by Sherman Alexie

I don’t recall the moment when I officially became a storyteller—a talented liar—but here I must quote Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer, who said, “Listen. If it’s fiction, then it better be true.”

To quote a song lyric I vaguely remember from a song and band I can’t fully recall: I remember everything.

Silence was his short bow and quiver of arrows.

Self-preservation was my religion.

“Nothing makes me hungrier than sadness,” I said.

I’d wanted to say something epic and honest. But epics are rarely honest, and honesty should never be epic.

Perhaps everybody, indigenous and not, lives on their own kind of reservation.

I don’t grieve everybody that I have lost.

I could write “I don’t know” one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.

And it’s not the good stuff that I recall. No. It’s the most traumatic shit that plays in the 3D IMAX Theater of My Mind.

Grief is a plastic surgeon.

So we must forgive all those Who trespass against us? Fuck that shit. I’m not some charitable trust. There are people I will hate Even after I’m ashes and dust.