Story

I am obsessed with stories. With narrative. Wherever there is a pattern, an arc, a purpose. But especially where there are connections.

Stories are constructs, associations of disparate things, peoples, times. Threads that run through realities and experiences and connect them.

I love reading stories. I love hearing stories. I love finding and eking out the stories of others, their places, their cultures.

My mother was an anthropologist. That might explain it. She was always seeing connections. She read to me extensively when I was a child; and I listened. To her, to the radio, to sermons. I had stories in me before I had anything else.

When little, the stories were entertainment. Harry Potter and playing pretend were escapes — not from anything terrible, just away from the mundane. Stories are an elevated state of being, where the world means something, where life makes a little bit more sense, where things are ideal for once. That’s the thing about fiction: even if it’s horrifying, in the mind, it’s ideal.

But as I grew older, the stories became less concrete, less contained, no longer bound between the covers of books or between endings and beginnings.

Stories became abstract, continuous, neverending

The threads running between real people, real circles, real lives, real deaths,

weaving a tapestry of life behind my eyes and in my mind to make some semblance of an understanding of the reality before me

that was me, that is me

that is the way I see the world.

In my mind, life is a storybook, the memories vaguely chronological, the experiences hazily catalogued, running together into one person, one compendium, one account.

One story.

And it is edited. Condensed.

Ideal.

Much I do not remember. Much I will not remember.

Many threads have been irreversibly, tangled, and,

Cut.

But for now, I keep writing

setting down the words

on the pages

until there are no pages.

No more pages.

And then?