Your Story, My Story

by Connie Palmen

Friends, like family, want you to remain unchanged, while love has the indecent capacity to transform you, to enrich you with a new take on everything you were once familiar with.

Everything that’s denied and repressed, every conflict that’s swept under the carpet and disavowed, in a culture or in an individual’s existence, seeks a way out and ultimately—violent, destructive, diabolically disguised—turns against life.

Memory is literary by nature. It takes factual events and gives them a metaphorical charge, lending what really happened a symbolic weight, persistently in search of the security of a story.