My Life as Fiction

For those of you who slurred my use of viscous metaphors in the initial post, I spit in your general direction.

Now, on to the burning question for today: Is my life so twisted as to seem fictional or have I fictionalized my life?

I know that much of what drips down from my gray matter and out my fingers is writer's license deliberately and liberally applied to an event in my life. But some of it is how I actually remember things, although siblings often cry foul.

How is it that specific memories can be stored so differently by people who have had the same experience? I remember once being astonished during a conversation with one of my six siblings at the disparate recollections of a shared incident.

What comes into play when a memory is filed away in the catacombs of our minds?

It would seem that one's personality must affect perception, coupled with their emotional state at the time. Another component might be the tendency to whitewash, or not, the walls of each experience.

Do we reinvent our lives by doing personal edits as we store the chapters of our past? Are we creating a more appealing version of what actually transpired; one that smooths like beach glass with the constant handling of years?

Whatever the case, I pray my family and friends don't take my interpretations to heart as I share the warped contents of my brain. In addition to a faulty storage system, they must surely know that I am irrepressibly unable to sort fact from fiction!