The more I live, the more I think telling each other stories is why we live.
We look forward to our next breath, eager for life to write us a story that we can retell to the characters that shape our lives. We call each other on little devices that were once the stuff of science fiction and we say to each other, “Let’s meet here or there, now or later.” And then we drink things that loosen our tongues so that we’ll have the courage to tell each other not only our newest stories, but our most important ones, our most heart-expanding and heart-breaking ones. And through our stories, big or small, we undoubtedly prove to ourselves more than to anyone around us that we have lived. Things have happened to us, people have appeared in our lives in noteworthy fashion, stuck around in noteworthy fashion, left in noteworthy fashion.
Every day stories pile on to each other. Strangers tell us stories through television and songs and books, tell us their stories with the looks on their time-worn faces, even when they don’t come leaking out of their mouths a sentence at a time. If this planet ever strays from its orbit and sinks to the very bottom of space, it’ll be because of the weight of the stories we tell and don’t tell each other. Stories about what it means to be alive, a topic which will never be accurately summed up by any amount of written, spoken or lived retellings.
Don’t stories palpably texture the air around you? The fictional ones and the true ones alike, intertwined indistinguishably until who knows which speaks more truthfully about your desires and your needs, your experiences and your self?
