The Line Between Truth and Storytelling

“The line between what happened and what we remember.”

There’s a line I walk every time I sit down to write. Sometimes it’s razor thin, other times it stretches wide enough to disappear in the haze. That line is the space between truth and storytelling.

Chasing Echoes was born there.

Some pieces of the book are stitched from memory, fragments of experiences that still echo in the silence. Others are imagined, sharpened, twisted, or softened into something that could hold the weight of meaning without crumbling under the burden of fact.

But memory itself is tricky. Perspective becomes reality, and what we remember is never quite the same as what happened. Time distorts. Experience reshapes. Trying to recreate the emotion of a moment years later means we’re not recalling the event, we’re retelling the shadow it left behind.

It’s been nearly fifteen years since some of the echoes in these pages first took root. By now, they live somewhere between memory and myth. Did it happen exactly the way I remember? Or have I rewritten it a hundred times without realizing it? I think all of us wrestle with that.

That’s why I don’t try to draw a hard line between fact and fiction anymore. Some wounds demand the cover of story, not to hide them, but to give them room to breathe. Fiction isn’t a mask, it’s a lens, one that lets us explore the echoes of truth without being bound by them.

The line between truth and storytelling isn’t where the story ends... it’s where it begins.

And in that space, maybe we can find something deeper than fact: something that feels real enough to matter.