Truth Wrapped
My goal for 2024 was to tell you one true story every month. I reached way back for some of them. Others arrived on my doorstep wrapped up in bad news. I got to relive some very funny moments, and share the things I’ve wanted to tell.
Thank you for being here for all of that.
I’ve also published a lot this year that wasn’t true. I told a story about a woman trapped in a bath tub, when the truth was I’ve been fighting my landlord to provide hot water since the summer ended. I told the story of a woman waiting too long for a proposal (GaaS, Lightspeed), when the truth was I got engaged in August and I’m beyond excited to be getting married next year. I told the story of a sculptor desperate for a patron or a fair wage, when the truth was I’ve been working for wages to subsidize my art, and while it’s not ideal I have made my peace with it.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for writing (I do indeed love to hear from folks who are enjoying this newsletter.) Thank you for getting through 2024 with me; it hasn’t been easy.
I don’t know what the theme of this newsletter will be for 2025. If you have a request, shout it over the music. If you want to read more of my stories, need writing advice, or would like to get real paper letters from me in the mail, come right this way. If you want to be on my holiday card list, send me an address.
Ok, one more true story. Real quick.
When I lived in Germany, I realized (as many Americans do) that Germans will undertake a 5-6 hour hike without packing much of anything or preparing in any way. They call this “going for a walk.” My partner at the time called it exactly that before leading me deep into the woods.
I spoke bad German. I planned to live there the rest of my life, a worldly expat at 19, eager to adopt a European mindset while also cultivating the ‘not from around here’ mystique. I loved the woods around his house in Buchholz, and I imagined myself as the kind of person who might like hiking, even though I absolutely hated it. That’s youth! I didn’t know how to like what I liked yet.
What I loved, though, was loudly on display. And after about three hours, there it was: a little-known stone circle. They’re all over the continent; though later on I would stand in the middle of the most famous one at Stonehenge, this will always be my first.
Some of the stones had been cut into sections and then put back together with thin, skillful lines of concrete. When I asked, my tall Teutonic love told me that people in the 18th and 19th centuries had carted the stones off to become foundations for chimneys and hearths. But when someone in the 20th figured out what they’d done, authority pulled them like rotten teeth to put them back where they belonged in the past, in the woods.
The stones were shorter than me, arranged along the usual solar lines. Moss grew on their north sides and mushrooms sprouted under the curves of their bellies. Beaming, my blue-eyed boy said, “no tourists. No cars. No gatepost. No guides. Just you and me, and all of history.”
That guy is history now, but I’ll never forget that he gave me eternity. He gave me the stones, built and broken and built again, pointing me toward where the light comes back. He gave me the circle in the way that we’re all meant to get it: it is yours to take part in, and never yours to keep.
Not everyone who gives you a past can give you a future. Enjoy the mushrooms and the moss while you can. Accept your present and hike home.