Sweet Little Lies

 A narrative is always imposed, and when the newcomer arrives, it is not merely an arrival but an occupation of the narrative field. To exist within a story is never enough; permanence must be secured, and permanence requires authorship. Thus, the newcomer takes up the pen and redraws the script. In the logic of narrative survival, others must be made into villains, foils against which the new protagonist can claim legitimacy. It is a familiar violence, subtle but unrelenting, because as Barthes reminded us, authorship is always a performance, an arrangement of signs that privileges certain characters while banishing others to the shadows. The one caught between stories—the attempted mediator, the figure trying to hold multiple truths at once—suffers most acutely from this rearrangement. They are forced into confusion, for Ricoeur’s notion of emplotment makes clear that coherence requires a selective weaving, and once the weaving begins, no thread can remain neutral. To balance competing stories is to live in perpetual dissonance, where fidelity to memory collides with the demands of the new plot. The one written off has no such luxury. They are simply excised, displaced into silence, not because their story lacks worth but because it disturbs the coherence of the present. In Bauman’s vocabulary of liquid modernity, the unwanted friend is rendered redundant, left to evaporate into invisibility so that the new bond can feel weightless and unencumbered. Yet such erasures are never total. The pursuer and the newcomer may conspire in the performance of harmony, presenting a façade that “all is well,” but this façade rests on a brittle surface. Stories are not obedient; they refuse complete concealment. Memory, as Ricoeur insisted in Memory, History, Forgetting, is not so easily domesticated—it returns in traces, in stubborn reminders, in the gestures that cannot be entirely re-scripted, in the coffee and the cookies brought from afar or the White Zinfandel wine that is hard to procure. The pursuer, who believes control lies in the act of burying, discovers instead that they are ensnared, at the mercy of one who remembers, the one whose story refuses to vanish and the objects – empty bottles of wine – have been seen. And here emerges the profound irony: the one who has been replaced, cast into shadow, and seemingly erased from the stage, is the very one who holds the key to the truth. They are the silent archivist, the keeper of the inconvenient narrative that no new arrangement can entirely undo. Their presence—though muted—remains a latent force, a reminder that displacement is never absolute. The replaced person carries the archive of what was actually lived, and in that archive resides the possibility of rupture, the possibility that the official story can one day be undone. For the newcomer, this generates a permanent anxiety. They may stride forward as if triumphant, believing that possession of the present grants mastery over the past, but anxious of what they do not know but the earlier person knows. Thus the shadow remains: what was withheld from me, what story was untold, what truth lingers just beyond my reach? In that not-knowing lies the fracture, the ever-present suspicion that their narrative rests on a foundation riddled with omissions. The newcomer becomes haunted by absence, for every act of erasure simultaneously confirms that there is something worth erasing. Thus the story closes, not with resolution but with instability. The imposed narrative secures only temporary coherence, never permanence. And in the quiet persistence of memory, in the archive held by the one replaced, the potential for reversal always waits. The stage may seem settled, but the script is never final. To the newcomer there is a word of caution from Fleetwood Mac when they remind us in their song to the newcomer, “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.”