Owning the narrative

Every night I try to find him.

I grind my teeth. My hands ball into fists, and I grimace so hard it gives me headaches.

I wake myself calling out his name. Even now. Last night. And years have passed since I lost him.

You can tell yourself it doesn’t make sense. You can tell yourself to move on and forget. But there are some things that go so deep, you can’t escape them even if you know it would be better for you if you could.

I’ve tried to escape this more times than I can count, because there is nothing I can do to recover what was taken. The part of me that walked into hell to find him, the part that had faith that he would come back with me, did not survive.  

I am writing it down now. Bit by bit. I am putting it to paper. I have reams of notes and records and analysis. I kept everything. As an analyst, this is what I do. I seek data, I organize it, and I identify patterns.

History is written by the victors. I was not victorious. But if I write this, I win back a little of what they took.

There is something important about owning the narrative. I realized  this quite poignantly when Sjors lied about me in the internal Dutch investigation, and when that lie propagated and began to tear my career and life apart. Perhaps I even realized it before then, when Sjors lied to me about his work with MIVD, and began to lie to himself about the motivations for his decisions. There is power in story. By telling a story that persists, it becomes a truth in itself.

Whenever I tried to sort things out verbally with Sjors in those last moments of privacy we shared, he didn't want to hear it. He always shut me down. Maybe he didn't want another melody to collide with the tune he was busy humming. I see now that the last things I ever gave him were my memories. I sent him three or four e-mail messages describing what I remembered about us. I gave up the last sacred things I had of us. They are still sacred to me.

My friend, Marie, is my reader. She has always been my reader: the witness of the events that brought me here.  Strangely, she even met Sjors. And she tracked on the correspondence with Mac, and the improbable events that followed. So I capture one memory a day. When I'm finished, I'll sum them up and take a look and see what patterns I can see. I'll publish them in a book, perhaps. And the narrative, whatever I can make of it, will not be lost.