Other Birds

by Sarah Addison Allen

Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They’re the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them.

“In all my years, I’ve never encountered something that didn’t mean anything.”

Once you accumulate enough regrets in life, they cease to hurt you. They are simply one more thing you collect, like age spots or ugly figurines.

Maybe I thought that if I just collected enough words, I could totally rewrite myself one day.

But Zoey was uneasy with the thought of untold stories. What happens to them? Where do they go? If you never share your stories with at least one other person, does that mean they weren’t real, that they never really existed?

But he didn’t know her. He didn’t understand her. All he knew was what she should have been. And that concept alone defined her and, to a certain extent, him.

But she’d failed to understand that as long as other people were involved, you were never fully in control.