History, excerpted from Sean Dorsey Dance's "Uncovered: The Diary Project"

By: Sean Dorsey

I always knew it, it turned out to be like this.
Did you know? History is a trick, the living play on the dead. 
Pretending will remember right? Do them justice. But history is a trick. 
It's an old rickety wooden house on a movie set that leans way too much to one side. That isn't actually a house at all, just a facade.
A thing representing the real thing. But, it leans way too much to one side. It isn't quite right. But we've been told it's a house. So it's a house. History is a trick that way of seeing. It tells us and so we believe. If history is the old rickety leaning house, then memory is the tools we used to build it. Remember, how do we remember you? When you die, you step out of where you are now, and you leave. And there's this perfect imprint of you left behind. And that's called grief. Grief is the fossil that's left behind by loss. So people can look at this fossil and remember you exactly right when it's early on, and still in their grief time. But then grief gets old and starts to leave. And things get a little muddy. The grief leaves us bit by bit by bit. Until what's left behind the view is just memory, from loss to greif, to memory. Now you're already twice removed, you can see how it goes. You can see how that false house gets built, eventually.
And then much later when more time passes, you become three times removed when memory fades away, and then all that's left to view is history. Other people get involved now, people who never even knew. They're the ones that write it all down. Your history. And they have their own version of things. And they may have their reasons to write things down wrong to write you down and now you're just history. The facade is a false house built by set builders who never even knew this house, rickety, leaning, and all our foremothers and forefathers and for nine others. What if history is a trick, if it isn't actually a house at all. But if that's all we have, how do we remember you