My Voice
Monday, February 9th, 2009
Come in and sit on the bottom step. I am up early waiting for your story to walk in. I’ve left the stairwell lit and the television on to prompt something in your past, and if it would help, I can start some coffee. I am ready at the keyboard to write it down as you tell it to me, and I’m excited to hear how much exciting is than the stories that I have to tell. In a moment, I’ll open the window and on the cold wind I will hope that, at the very least, your words will blow in. The story might be about the moment – the early morning, the day not yet turned to light – or it might be about the way you spent a Saturday in your childhood. I can help you dreamily about it, clear away the haze, and be finished in time to lay myself down before has risen high over the rooftops. Just one rules: Let me tell it in my voice and not yours.
I understand if you don’t take me up on my offer. I don’t like to relive the past, either, and like you, I’ve also noticed that the words are asleep this morning. They are not ready to come out. They are busy between closed pages and in furious journal scribblings tucked under beds last night. Jilted high school lovers came home semi-drunk and took notebooks from between mattresses and box springs to sort out their feelings, and then after a few short, hateful paragraphs, put their thoughts back in a dark place so they forget by this morning. Something has happened for them to tell about. They are brave. Maybe you have a similar story to tell.
The jaded do not fashion themselves as writers. For them, the task is to work something out. And they never consider their lives as stories, though they do often see themselves as characters. Is this you? In storytelling, the resolution is nearly inevitable and the characters come out changed. But outside of fiction, it seems that people go through much – especially adolescents – and the events do not change them so much as stamp them with insecurities. Your insecurity is the fear to share your story.
I am about to give up and sip my coffee someplace else, when I hear footsteps on the front porch and the various doors pull and push open. I hear feet on the floorboards above me. Come down to visit. Take a seat on the final step. And tell me what it’s like to have lived much and still not be able to put it into words.
