Some of the memories I have are joyful, some of them are sad and that was the reality. Sometimes I danced with a grin on my face until dawn in a circle of my closest friends, sometimes I fell over on the streets running for the night bus in the rain and lay on the wet pavement for far longer than I should have. Sometimes I knocked myself out walking into a lamp post, left with a purple chin for days. But sometimes I woke up in a loving tangle of hung-over girls, filled with nothing but comfort and joy.
When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.