Ultimately we all live two lives: the life we actually lead, replete with mundane realities, paying bills, earning a living, making dinner, using the toilet; and the life we dream of, filled with magic, and emotion, and adventure, and revisions - revisions of the reality, of the mundane, . . . revised with the magic of how we felt, not the mundane of what we did. Meeting a woman you love may be a boring story in reality, but in your heart it is a soaring epic tale of two hearts destined to come together after the romantic passage of oceans of time and incredible odds. It is a movie we play out in our minds with the most passionate kiss, the most unlikely romance, and the most exciting conclusion. In time, as we age, the puritanical definition of truth becomes far more subjective - and how we remember something is as important as how it really happened. Nay, it is far more important, and reality and imagination and memory all fuse into one glorious truth. Not a reality, but a truth. My children are not likely ever to know what my life was really like. But I surely hope they remember how I felt, how they made me feel, and how I lived every day in a romantic, fantastical theatre of emotion that may have been unreal, but it was surely the truth. I hope they love me enough to remember legend more than reality and make a myth out of the mundane father they actually had. For life is a work of art - a connected prose of comedy, tragedy, epic, horror, fantasy, aspiration and imagination. Mine was just a little more melodramatic than most. And in every memory there is a mountain of truth, and occasionally, a smattering of reality.
See you in hell,
Shakes.
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