Day 343 - Historian Story

Historian Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

There were too many paths; he couldn’t keep them all straight. He wrote them down and tried to map them out and rearrange things so that they would all make sense. That was just about impossible. There were too many variables to understand. Everything tied together, but it didn’t always make sense. Things ebbed and flowed. Time was variable. Chance was variable. There were too many reasons, too many accidents of fates, too many conflicts with too many outcomes.

Time was a big mess.

He knew it to be true, but he couldn’t stop himself from trying. It was his obsession; his mission in life. He was a historian and this was what he did. He looked at the minutia and tried to find the grand map in things. But history wasn’t really designed that way. History wasn’t what had happened or what could have happened; it was what someone somewhere decided did happen with the truth whitewashed and simplified, in order to make it accessible. Truth hardly mattered. It was the story that was important.

He had written so many accounts. There were the versions based on hope and there were the versions based on misery and the various types of human misery. Some versions looked back and tried to understand. Some looked forward and only took the pieces that helped to justify the expedience of the moment. And then there were the versions that tried to clean the past and dress it up as myth and miracle with little regard for what could have or should have actually happened.

The truth was that they were all just stories. They were his conceits, his inventions. He wrote down so many versions. He liked writing down as many versions as possible. Separate accounts.  Conflicting accounts. Accounts that made no sense at all. He wrote and he wrote and he wrote, until one day he had forgotten what was true and what was just his imagination.

The timeline was broken and changed so many times. There were times that were scrambled and jumbled around and there were entire eras he just made up on a lark. But what he wrote down became truth. Sure there were alternate versions and versions that couldn’t co-exist, but that was okay. They all worked out and they all combined to make a fluid tapestry of space-time. It didn’t matter. None of the many pasts mattered. They were just approximations and illusions and false memories. The present didn’t need the past and the future certainly didn’t need either of them. They could all exist or not exist. It didn’t really stop the others from functioning on their own.

His stories were just stories. Everyone thought they were true, so they were true. He wrote them down as evidence, and that was all the present required – some evidence that the past had indeed occurred. It could be any past. It didn’t matter. The present would never know and no one living in the present would ever see enough or know enough of the past to even begin to figure out if it all made sense or not. He could claim anything happened. As long as there was some document or some word of mouth account enough time could then pass and the story would hold. The truth would be set. It was easy.

He had made so many versions and written them all down. He had written down too many versions. It was a curse. It was all too confusing. He couldn’t keep them straight anymore. He couldn’t remember what was true and what wasn’t. It was a terrible problem for him, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter all that much. It was all in the past anyway and meant to be forgotten. And so it was.