“You genuinely believe a person can sum up her life in just three words?” -Mirinae Lee, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster

                My sibling Maple’s visiting, and lately we’ve been talking about the way stories say and don’t say things. I’m coming off a couple-year kick of being pretty frustrated by how the stories I write seem, in my mind, to make lies: they arrange moments and experiences into a sequence that ‘makes sense,’ that ‘has a direction,’ but that sense and direction is imposed by the story making. The writing (I’ve been feeling) draws lines that weren’t there in the living. My sibling resists, insisting that they appreciate stories — and music, and photography — precisely because all these help them understand what they’re feeling. All these are different camera lenses turned toward a piece of life, and showing something.
                One of these talks happened while we were waiting at the laundromat. Our clothes went round and round. So, I suppose, did we, playing through how our ideas curled and flopped. Maple is also a wonderful photographer. They wouldn’t say that: they would say they like looking through a camera, and they love how that practice changes the way they see light. Then today they turned around their laptop to show me a picture I love. It’s a sink, half in shadow, half in bright sun.  “Where’s that?” I asked. “At the laundromat,” they said. And I know the sink they must have been looking at when they took the picture. I’ve seen that sink, and used it. And I missed something about its fullness until I looked at it in Maple’s flat picture.
                So I don’t think that anyone can sum up her life in just three words. I’m frustrated by stories. I’m also excited about how words (and pictures) show something beside what they’re showing. How, in this moment, my window (which mostly reflects the kitchen) shows also a street lamp outside, the suggestion of a tree, a world I mostly can’t see but can’t stop feeling here.