Stories

           On every street corner there stands a story. Stories brush past you on a busy sidewalk. Stories hand you your groceries on a Saturday afternoon. Stories come knocking on your door, trying to sell you life insurance. We are surrounded by stories, yet how precious few do we ever really know? We may know our own story, we may even think we know the stories of those closest to us, but think of all the innumerable stories that we do not know and will never know. Which stories may be like our own? Which are complete contrasts? Which stories will the world remember?

With every day that we open our eyes, take in a new breath, and allow ourselves to be swept further along the current of life, we are effectively picking up our pens and etching another chapter in the narrative of our lives. Each action, word, glance, thought, emotion, reaction, attraction, repulsion, decision, indecision, and anything in between marks another addition to the ever-extending drama, comedy, melodrama, horror, and mystery that is us. It goes without saying that no two stories are alike. What might need to be said, however, is that even the same story is different depending on the audience. The beauty of our stories is that fact that they are not mere words on a page or typeface in a book, they are an infinitely complex assemblage of remembrances, feelings, emotions, and occurrences that come together in a uniquely definitive progression of what we have so simply named life. And while we may be tempted to believe our stories are immutable and unchangeable in the ways in which it is understood or ultimately viewed, I think we can all come to the realization that this is just not true.

The audience of our lives is not the audience of a book. They do not read the same words; they do not even see the same cover, title, or author. Our audiences and the part of our story that they experience is as varied as the very DNA of the human race. With each new pair of eyes, with each new set of ears, and with each new pair of hands, our story is seen, heard, and felt differently. Our audience rarely, if ever, gets the whole picture. Most often, they only get a glance, a fleeting picture of the long, rich storyline of our lives, and yet, this is all they will ever see. The members of our audience are not merely audience members either; they are authors themselves. In experiencing even a part of our story, our audience is compelled to add a few lines to their own work in progress; if not in exact detail, then in an impression, shade, or mood. In this way, even our most basic interactions represent an intermingling of two astonishingly intricate narratives, and the result is a breaking off, a sharing of one story to another. No two stories can come into contact without affecting the other.

This interaction is something like writing on a thin surface on an impressionable surface; whatever is written while on this surface will leave an imprint, even after the writing is finished and removed. In this way, we are all like a sea of impressionable sheets, constantly writing our own stories and imprinting them on others while simultaneously being imprinted. These imprints may not be perfectly legible, perfectly understood, but they are impressions nonetheless, with lasting, real effect.  

            What are we then? Are we authors, protagonists, antagonists, or audience members? Are we the story or the medium on which the story is written? Are we the writers or the written? To the best of my knowledge, and to the fullest extent of my intellectual probing, I can only think to answer this question with: yes. We are all of these and so much more. We are the experience that makes a mystery intriguing or a comedy hilarious. We are the tears that make a tragedy sorrowful and the fear that makes a horror terrifying. We are the fire and tenderness that makes a love story infatuating, and we are the love and longing that makes a journey home worth every step of the way. We are stories, we are inseparable, and in the end, we are a part of something so much larger than our own story. Our stories are not isolated and self-sustaining; they are fueled by the stories of others and the experiences we share with them. Our story may only be one of many, but they are no less important or significant because of this; our story touches a myriad of others, whether we know it or not. What we are left with, then, is life. Life and all its nuances, peculiarities, and similarities, all bundled up into each of our stories, beautifully and sometimes unwittingly interwoven into a masterful tapestry of “good mornings,” “how do you do’s” and “I love you’s.”

            This is the story of all our stories.