Forestwalker - The Wandering Souls

Forward

You may be familiar with the concept of a message in a bottle. In case you are not, the idea is that someone would write a note, place it in a bottle, cork the bottle, and throw it into the ocean.

A message in a bottle is not an SOS. It's not really even an actual communication with the outside world. It is, rather, the embodiment of hope beyond reason.

This story is a message in a bottle. I don't know who will read it or if anyone else ever will. It has a very specific hoped-for audience, yet that hope is the same that is sealed in a bottle and thrown into the ocean.

At the same time, if you are reading this, you are the right audience. Like everything else ever written, like every life ever lived, intentions are only the starting point. They do not matter as much as what grows from them.

And every story ever told, fiction or non, is a mixture of truth and tall tale. Each is cobbled together from the experiences, loves, passions, hates, hopes, fears... from all the pieces and parts the storyteller has collected over the course of a life. Even a completed story is never really static.

Think about any story you loved as a child. Consider how its meanings and nuances seem to alter over the years, how some phrases and moments stand out to you now because of who you were when you first read them or how others stand out to you now because you didn't notice them before. Stories grow and change as we do because they are living things, dynamic things, telling us as much about ourselves as they ever do about the author or the author's intent.

Every story ever put into words is both an invention and an imperfect recollection of the truth. Narratives are immersive portraits, serving both as a kind of plea the author throws out into the void hoping to be seen, and an invitation for the audience to find their place within the tale.

All of this makes me think of one of my favorite books that I first read in college, "Caramelo," by Sandra Cisneros. A central theme of the book is that honesty is something not fully encompassed by facts. Every experience and every story and every narrative we keep is colored by a thousand things inside of us over which we have no control.

Knowing that is not enough to offset it, but if we approach both our stories and those of others with the knowledge that they are less about factual truth than they are about imperfect memories of feelings and emotions, perhaps we can avoid the error of taking anyone's version of events as if it were an accurate and factual record. I think that applies as much to our own versions of events as it does to those of others.

So, I like the idea of a fictionalized narrative. It makes more clear the relationship between the story and the facts. It is much easier to remember when you are reading a story like this one, with overlapping perspectives from different characters, that our stories are not statements of fact, but rather representations of memories and all the other faulty and often misguided things that exist within our hearts and minds.