A Note... on Two.

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[A Note on Two: Nasha U. Khan]

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A Stirring.

A few years ago a curious story smacked rather unexpectedly into me. The setting was familiar. The characters were dear. The plot, insincere. In it stood a trust, a reality, and a line. By the end — like all stories go — one lay broken, one straddled and shifted, and one was densely drawn. Unlike most stories worth telling however, this one willfully failed to ask the searing question.

Is this the truth?

And yet at the height of conflict, the place all compelling stories gather steam, a charge was made summarily against only one. Because, it argued with the impertinence of the confidently injudicious, writers were by task and trade storytellers after all — and therefore, incapable of truth.

In any circumstance, particularly in matters of justice, the question of veracity by virtue alone should take a stand. It should. It often doesn’t.

Think of all the stories you’ve ever heard. Has any truth ever successfully escaped the critical eye, sound reason, clear evidence, and burden of proof? Probably not.

But it has managed to slide out the backdoor unseen, while we distractedly peered into a single lens. Unfocused and shallow. Prone to chromatic aberration. Unable to transmit light. With no discerning sight. Only a distorted image of one blurry moment stretched across time. The image on which we rest entire cases. And in which we believe so dogmatically that we’re unable, or unwilling, to invite in another possibility which lies just beyond the scope of a dark and absurdly narrow tunnel — the possibility of truth.

Riding on the wheels of language.

Defiant and audacious.

With the writer at its side.

I wanted to scream: Writers cannot lie, you morons. Instead I muffled myself and mulled over this for some time. Even challenging the writer’s integrity against a craft I passionately hailed and credited for rescuing me from a worse fate.