Writing the Truth?

“There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.” Maya Angelou

(from this morning’s writer’s prompt courtesy of

Narratively Academy

)

The facts are bare. The truth dresses up in the latest style. In writing, is the current fashion deep confessional? Is the trend a “me too” twist.. Sharing experiences we may have in common?

Where does the truth go when we fight fashion and do our own thing. I remember granny dresses and fake granny spectacles to go with them. I remember poor boy sweaters with short sleeves and deep colors, rounded necklines and heavy ribbing. I dressed like a waif in college, long bell bottom jeans, faded work shirts, hiking boots that never hiked, and long straggly hair. Later I tried sexy; off-the-shoulder, plunging neckline and sheer blouse sexy.

In which style did any of my truth live? Secrets kept over decades because, well the truth might hurt. Just like the skin shedding we do at night as we sleep, leaving microscopic traces of our physical outer coating on bed sheets, we shed our former selves and wake up to the possibility of an invented truth.

I am a grandmother now. What I did in college no longer matters. What I did as a newly-married career woman no longer matters. I pick up my grand children from their day camps and take them to the pool. They pat my rounded belly and laugh at me. I am a caricature of my former self. I am neither beautiful nor sexy. I am just an Emee.

Where does our truth go to Live? The real truth is it lives within our organs, in our brains. Where shedding cannot happen. I am always the lonely hitch hiker trying to outrun my parents disapproval and prove they are wrong. I am always the new mother who made mistakes and yet there was no one there to judge except myself. I go to my bed with the truth and wake up with the facts. I am old, and yet my truth is always young.

Who is that in the mirror? Surely I could have made other choices. Unlike my own grandparents, I had many choices. They only sought to escape death by Nazi concentration camps. They came to the United States because, simply, it could never happen here. But yet, it did. For those of Japanese descent. For those of African descent. And again it happens here, right now, right in front of us for those of Hispanic and Latino descent. I ask my dead forebears, what is the truth?

So don’t speak about truth to me. There is none. There is only our interpretation of the facts and the need to speak them despite the consequences. But does speaking the truth change anything? Does it make a difference? Truth can harm those we love and for what? To tell strangers a beautiful story. To reach inside a reader and let them know they are not alone. To charm an editor or amuse a critic. To forever change the way family sees you?

Truth is a choice and a decision a writer must make every time she sits down to write. Do we let truth die in the place we call the past? Or resuscitate it so to live a brain dead life among the living? I consider and I conclude. The facts live forever, but the truth must be banished and seek refuge elsewhere.