Smaller than the story

For twenty years a man has described a plate of fried fish he ate as a boy in Ismailia, on a holiday by the canal.

In the telling it has grown. The fish was the freshest he ever had, the bread was still warm, the sauce had something in it nobody has managed since. Every fish he has eaten as an adult has been measured against it and come up short.

One summer he goes back, and the place is still there. Same tiles, same plastic chairs. He orders exactly what he remembers.

It is fine. It is perfectly decent fried fish. It is not the plate he has carried around for two decades, because that plate was never on any table. It was built afterwards, out of being nine years old and on holiday with his father, and memory kept adding to it.

That is the usual direction for good things. Kept out of sight, they improve.

What is worth noticing is that bad things do the same, in reverse. The dinner with his fiancée's family that he dreaded for months. The phone call to a brother he had not spoken to in a year. The letter he would not open. Left unseen, each of those grew too, into something far heavier than it was.

When they finally arrived, most of them were like the fish. Ordinary. Survivable. Smaller than the story.

The imagination is generous in both directions, which is a good reason to stop letting it decide what to be afraid of.