My friend of over three decades tried to comfort me and her soldier husband: three tours, two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, a navy-blue sweatshirt boasting an Airborne patch, a bracelet saying Remember The Fallen circling his wrist, a black, rubber ring dark on his calloused hand, the kind soldiers wear to honor others who’ve served or lost their lives in combat.

Sometimes our stories will end on that happy moment, a hero back from hell, even if reductive or just a moment in time; and sometimes the return will involve a different kind of hell, a reckoning with memory and the past, a reckoning with the schism between a then and a now. This cohesion and possibility for healing—and sometimes art—happens in the telling of the tales, the shaping of experience, character, setting, wherever the story may take us on that narrative arc.