I grew up thinking the old days were like silent movies, shot in black and white and mostly forgotten.

Picturing them through a bleak, monochrome lens helped me brush aside my past much the same way, witlessly discarding any faded scenes that, in color, may have revealed more than I wanted.

Then well into adulthood, a voice behind me yelled, “Cut!”

I turned back and discovered I’d been adopted. Lied to my whole life.

In an instant, all I’d come to know of myself seemed to vanish. No past, present, or future remained to which I belonged. A fuse had blown, and the universe became a darkroom.

When I awoke, my yesterdays in Los Angeles slowly resurfaced, like a dusty film reel dropped from a staircase, unspooling down each step—its tiny, perforated frames emblazoned with famous faces in whose company the truth was concealed.

I endeavored to develop the negatives, hoping a reliable image might arise from the emulsion. But how do you arrange a carousel of grey, disjointed memories hidden for over thirty years?

That answer materialized one evening in the advice of an angelic widow I’d once worked beside in a bookshop. With so many chapters of her life spent perusing the shelves, she’d become a hunchback, her spine nearly broken.

Upon hearing my dilemma, she gently took my hand as if to read it.

“I know of only seven stories in this world,” she said, tracing a line in my palm. “Just seven stories even the most ambitious writer could hope to reconstrue—a tragedy, a comedy, the journey, a quest, the rags-to-riches fable, a rebirth, and the tale of a monster.”

Then, staring into my hungry eyes, she leaned in and whispered, “Which one is yours?”

Suddenly, I knew.