The Danger of a Single Story

When you trust someone, when you love someone, you want with your whole heart to believe what they say is true. You will ignore the inconsistencies. You will shut out whatever the world tries to tell you is reality. You will see the world that they paint—the tints, shadows, and highlights layered and layered and layered. But what happens when that painting is watercolor, and a single drop sheds away that gilded facade? What if that drop is the tear of someone else you love, whose pain is indefinitely tattooed by the painter herself? Every other day I watched as the paintings would manifest and every other other day, I watched them wash away. As an only child of divorced parents, this is my reality. My mother would tell one story: a villainous father who abandoned me and her for parties, travel, and drinks. My father would say another: a Mother Gothel who tried with lawsuits and lies to lock me up in a tower far from him. Her friends would flood her story. His friends would do the same, curating my lives to be a certain way. I was the thread binding these two diverging tectonic plates that would rather break the atmospheric bounds than meet again. If any thread would break, my world would be the north pole that would never see the south. Divorce, for me, destroyed unity within myself, my family, my life; but is my recollection any more real?