“I mostly feel terrible about not getting into grad school because it was the justification for my not working while I went to school, that I was going to work really hard so I could get accepted somewhere,” I told Spook as we drove home from Chicago.
“That wasn’t it at all,” Spook said. “You hadn’t even decided that yet. It wasn’t until your second semester or so. You were just taking psych classes to fit a requirement.”
“No way,” I said. “I was studying the Kaplan Psych GRE book in the hallway before my Intro Psych course, so at the very least, it was the first September back to school, though I remember it earlier. And I only took the psych class to see if I wanted to go to grad school for it. I’d already taken anthro and soc.”
“Oh,” Spook said. “Well, anyway I thought I was pretty clear. Your being a serious undergrad student was enough justification. It didn’t hinge on grad school.”
“I don’t remember you saying that,” I said.
“Maybe I didn’t,” he said.
“You probably did. I’m pretty dense. I’m surprised you didn’t correct me though when I said all that stuff about grad school being the reason.”
“I don’t think you told me,” Spook said.
“Oh? I could have sworn I did,” I said.
“Maybe you did,” he said.
With little else to do, we told each other the story of how we remembered the months leading up to my return to college and the conclusions we came to about our joint finances and were amused by how little resemblance one account bore to the other.
*
I’m coming more and more to believe that everything we say to one another is fiction of a kind, that no one fully tells the truth, and that it’s a troubling sign when two people tell the exact same story surrounding an event and probably indicates that the story is being transmitted independently of the event (as its own entity) and that the event itself is not being recounted.
And you see, the memoirs I’m always chipping away at can’t be anything more than their own kind of fiction, the narrative arc I struggle to construct from the events of my life.
I’ve given up on one inviolable truth.
It’s freeing, really.