Munn Dane

There's an old Tracy Chapman song with the lyrics,
"There is fiction in the space between/
the lines on your face and memory/
you will do and say anything/
to make your everyday life seem less mundane..."
Lately I've been wondering about that space between memory and story; where does it lie, and why does it, all too often, lie? In that crevice between memory and story is the element of storytelling: the difference between memory and story is that story is shared. My memories die with me; my stories may grow and evolve into anecdotal wisdom or insights into my personality. Stories are how other people understand and share us; memories are how we do the same for ourselves. How then, is it so easy to lie about it? I don't mean oversights, like there were four chairs instead of three, but the larger, more fundamental pieces of the story, like there wasn't emotion where it was inserted, or something was said that was later omitted? Is it subconscious or intentional? My sister and I have many shared memories, but how we express and interpret these makes them into very different experiences. Time blurs the sharp edges of memory.
Last year I started to write a short story about a man named Munn Dane, whose whole life was a long stretch of uneventful spaces, and how that slowly drove him to obsessively seek potential events, if only to have a story to tell. We as a people are desperate to have something to share, to connect through, to point to and say, "this is who I am in a story," to make life less lonely. We want to say, "I tell these stories because they are mine."
A little disjointed because I'm still thinking about it.
More to come I'm sure.