There is a story about me. I know it as it was passed down in each retelling than in any original memory inside my head. I was perched up on the lap of my great aunt. Raised up at the dining table. The rest of my birthday party scattered out around us, caught up in their own games. Instead, from what I’m told, I was captivated instead by the colorful letters that spelled out happy birthday on the paper plates. A small hand reaching out, that little index finger pointing and prodding the plate.
“What’s this?”
“That’s a B”
She would have sat there with me all day, to tell me the name of each letter over and over again. I can only now appreciate the second hand joy that she must have felt in witnessing a child experience the world.
I enjoy stories like this, and not only because that it gives me a modicum of confidence that even then I might have had some predilection towards written words. As the years progress, the stories that we choose to each other grow in importance. Today, I retreat further into books, finding the worlds of fiction more palatable and encouraging than anything happening outside of my front door. I am addicted to the prospective truth that exists between the covers of cheap mass market paperbacks. Even to the small space between the lines of thread bound composition notebooks, slowly filling up with my own nonsense, scribbled down to unladen my mind. There feels a more comfortable space than navigating a public street.
Its the comfort that exists deep the breaths required to retell all of these old stories. All of the tales, tired and overplayed, but we must come back to ourselves despite all of the chaos. Where in each retelling I might have sat longer and longer on her lap. Testing her patience on how many times she would tell me that one that shoots down is a y. The minute facts of reality have been lost to time. If I even held them once, my brain has dropped them long ago, and no I no longer care.
Its the love the persists decades later. The resurrection of lost ones. Its the ounce of sadness that balances the scales, dense against light-hearted whimsy. How I feel now, how she must of then, how fleeting we are. Its our oral history of nonsense, that reveals how there is nothing more to this world than that of each other. That all of this labor and turmoil are twisted ways of forging the key to the small box of secrets within ourselves.