Finally, Matt was about to tell me. He had been keeping something from me all week, some drama about him and his mother. He liked to tease me by making me wait to hear his interesting stories. The ratty blue couch in the dorm living room squeaked a little as I shifted my weight and looked at him. He picked at his sleaves and shook his blonde hair.

"Just tell me the story already. You've been stalling all week," I said.

"Okay, okay. Ugh, I don't want to go home. It's gonna be really awkward with my mom," he replied.

I rolled my eyes and grinned a little. "What did you do to her? Something awful, I bet."

"I told her I was gay."

I laughed. "Very funny. Now seriously, what's the story?"

"No, I really did. That's what the story was about."

I looked at him, his perfectly serious face and blue eyes, and raised an eyebrow. "Uh-huh." I wasn't going to be taken in by one of his pranks. He continued to regard me seriously, unable to believe that I thought he was kidding. I sighed. "If I believe this, and you're lying to me, I'm gonna kill you. I won't talk to you for like 3 weeks."

He grinned. "I'm serious. But you actually have a period of time picked out?"

Somehow, my best friend, who I've known since middle school, turned out to be gay, and I had no clue. He confessed to me that he was in love with a guy named Dave who he had known for about four years. He wanted me to go with him to the beach for Spring Break to see Dave. Dave knew that Matt was gay and knew that Matt liked him. Oh, and Dave had a girlfriend. Somehow, this trip sounded like a good idea to me.

Matt became very moody at the beach, especially when Dave would talk to me more than he talked to Matt (or so Matt said). Dave said he was just trying to make me feel welcome. I tried to stay out of their business and give them alone time. At night, Dave and Matt would sleep on the pullout bed while I slept on the floor, since there was no real bed in the apartment. Matt reported to me that Dave would cuddle with him at night, and that one night they held hands. Then things started to change.

Dave turned out to be something of a partier. Dave and his roommate invited friends over one night and they all got high, which upset Matt. Dave and Matt argued about Dave's future, because Matt didn't agree with him going into the military, trying to convince him to go to college instead.

One morning, I got up before anyone else and walked outside. The grass was damp but nice. I breathed in the fresh air, glad not to be in the apartment. I heard steps behind me. When I turned, Dave was there with his dog, bringing it out for a walk. A lit cigarette was perched in the corner of his mouth. We talked for a bit about random things, then he asked me if Matt was gay. I was confused. Didn't Dave already know Matt was gay?

"I suspected, and he told me once, but I thought he was joking because of the way he said it."

Made sense, I guess. I had thought Matt was joking at first too. Dave went on to ask if Matt liked him. Hadn't Matt already told him that too? I gave a non-commital maybe, saying something like maybe Matt had a crush on him or something.

"Well," Dave said, "I'm straight. I want Matt to be happy, but I mean, I'm straight."

"Ah," I said, a bit stunned, and moved the topic to other subjects. Soon, Matt came walking up as well, like I knew he would when he saw Dave gone.

As soon as I got the chance I told Matt what Dave had said. Matt said that Dave had known he was gay because they once had a conversation about how Matt was going to have kids. Neither of us can figure out why Dave was acting so strangely, though we both have some theories, and Matt has fallen into a depression. Last night, he got drunk for the first time in his life.

I don't know what's going on here, but I don't like it. I want my best friend back.

*All names are fictional, to protect identities and because it makes me feel like a spy :)

There are rules to writing a story.

Oh, sure, these rules can be broken, if you're a skillful enough writer to pull it off. In general, though, most stories follow certain rules. One of these rules is that stories have plots.

My friend once told me that every life is a story. I guess, in its own way, that this saying is true. However, they must be stories by both the worst and the best writer ever to create a story. On the one hand, everyone's life story has moments of vibrant emotion, the likes of which make most fictional scenes look like pale ghosts floating among their warm, living counterparts. On the other hand, people's life stories tend to be tangled, plotless messes, often leading not to some grand culmination, some satisfying conclusion, some "ah-ha" moment (as one of my English teachers would have said), but instead leading merely either to a gradual vanishing of the spark that is in each person or a violent snuffing of that same spark when a tragedy strikes. The extinguished sparks leave a dimly glowing trail of artifacts in their wake, artifacts like fading memories in the minds of loved ones, pictures that yellow and curl up at the edges with age, and forgotten bits of writing or once-cherished articles of clothing cast away into boxes in a dusty attic.

How to gain meaning from something is to recreate it. Take a memory and turn it over in your hand like an aged love letter. Treat the memory as an artifact. Explore its delicate folds and smooth surfaces. Order it, organize it, give it a plot. Make it a story. Turn your memory into the pale ghost of the real event, in order to gain some sort of understanding, because the whole intricacy of the real event, all of the different threads flowing into it, is too much for you to take in at once.

Susan Sontag once wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." I think this is true. Through stories, we make meaning. Sometimes, I wonder if it also works the other way. Perhaps we live in order to tell stories. We tell ourselves stories in the form of dreams. We love the ones who share and witness our stories, and we witness theirs as well. Like the young girl Genie who was cut off from almost all human contact, when we can't participate in this exchange of stories, it hurts us. Without the exchange of stories we are crippled.

What I'm really here for is to tell my story, the way stories are meant to be told: one word, one sentence, one day at a time.