BB Grey–musings

*a response to a reader on one of my posts asking how much of my story line was taken from past experiences and how much was made up…

All writing is autobiography, just as every dream is memory in disguise. That girl in yellow? She exists between the pages of my life like a pressed flower—part botanical fact, part imagined fragrance. I could tell you her dress was size 2, that it clung to her hips like a question mark, that the tags might still be dangling from its hem like unkept promises. But what is measurement in the face of desire?

The truth bends like light through old glass—what you read is neither fiction nor memoir, but the residue of fifty-seven years of collisions with the world. Some moments stick like burrs to a wool coat; others evaporate by noon. I collect these fragments—the way her perfume hovered between us like a comma, the way the desert heat made the pavement weep—and arrange them into patterns that resemble truth.

Call it alchemy: I take the leaden weight of lived experience and spin it into something lighter, brighter, more bearable. The dress was real. The tags were imagined. The heartache? That’s where the story lives—in the liminal space between what happened and what might have been.

So read it as you will. All I ask is this: believe the feeling, even when you doubt the facts. The most true things are often the least factual.