A Story

A story is a story is a story. It’s one of those words I look at, and after a few times of reading it, I wonder, with the crystalline blank slate of a kindergarten child, is that the way it’s spelled? With blind innocence, I trust the people who are telling me the rules. Why am I learning to write? I already know a language. The language of feeling. But the adults don’t seem to understand that language. So I must learn to write. As I stare at my wide-lined page, the words become just letters, then morph into shapes. The meaning is deconstructed into a pre-creation state. I give it meaning. We gave it meaning. Language is powerful. We are powerful. I am powerful. But this was not always my story. I’ve gifted myself many stories. In some I am the hero, some the victim, some the artist, some the mother, at times the athlete, and others the martyr. Always the dreamer. The kindergarten storyteller was the best dreamer. She laid underneath the towering Oak trees in the midwest, letting her stories flow with the whistling wind, through the chattering leaves, and up to the billowy clouds. I get to choose whether I want the dream to be a magnificent tale of magical possibilities, or a nightmare of darkness I’m locked in like a room with trap doors. When I first learned English, like many children, I had the audacity to think I could make up my own language. I spoke with a combination of sounds to my six-year-old comrade. Only we knew what we were saying. In that state, our language was primarily intuitive. Because we knew each other. No, we really knew each other, in ways I do not know my fellow language exchangers anymore. Then I was introduced to the idea, the weed of an idea, that I am “the only one.” This is not a truth for me, nor anyone. Because my story, is also your story. And in the end, it is just “a” story. One I can change. I can change the meaning, the characters, and the outcome. I can make it an endless story of “choose your own ending” stories. I like this version better. The story that is malleable.  

In today’s story, I had a few choices. As I pondered what it would be, I reflected on last year’s saga. The one where I was the helpless mother who got presents from the gift drive. The one where I went to the food pantry because my husband had stashed all the money in his business account. A power struggle. The story where I left my engagement ring at home so people wouldn’t judge me for having “too much” to receive, while I mustered up the nerve to expose myself as not having “enough” to give. To my children. The only ones that mattered anymore. I muffled the sounds of my husband bragging about the different women he was banging the weeks leading up to Christmas. He was spiting me for telling him I wanted a separation the week of Thanksgiving. Granted, I told him to. I think my exact words were, “Please, go fuck someone else because I’m done being choked by you.” My ego does a shoulder dust when I tell it, though that doesn’t neutralize the sting. I try to let my vocal cords soften in the sand.

Tonight I have a lovely story. I have a choice. Nah, I won’t tell myself the one where I am fighting for income, how everything is falling apart, how my family is broken, and how I am alone, while everyone else gets to enjoy the holidays together. No, that’s an old story, and I don’t like it, so why tell it to myself? I won’t. Instead, I hear a story that rings with more truth. The one where I sit on my blue velour couch. The one I found this summer at a yard sale in the suburbs. The couch that came from a couple moving back to Brooklyn. It was the first piece of furniture I gifted myself in a long time, without asking permission from another adult. I sit by the warmth of my fireplace in the mountains, next to my sparkling Christmas tree. The one he complained about every year, because he thought decorations were annoying. Tonight, I only heard sounds of joy, from my five-year-old daughter who hung her homemade ornament, while boasting with pride. Tonight, I watched my three-year-old cradle a flickering purple light in her miniature hand, as she was still for a moment, enveloped with wonder. Tonight, I am surrounded by light, as my children sleep in my bed. The only bed I have. The one we share. Because when we are together now, we are together. This is my story tonight. A beautiful one filled with gifts of love.

As I wander up and down the grocery store aisles this week, surrounded by distracted shoppers buzzing with excitement and impatience, and trundle through the parking lot full of honking horns and misplaced shopping carts, I will remember. I will remember we are all tossing around the stories in our heads. Battling the stories our families and friends wish to impose on us, as we wrestle with our own version of the story. Let me be wrapped in a story of bewilderment. A story of the unknown, a story of renewal, connection, love, a story of the present. And when I am overwhelmed, let me remember, that it is just that…a story. Not unlike a dream. One I can be mesmerized by, or one I can let go of.   

Blue Velour