Story

Beginning a story, finding that idea, is like catching the view below a mountain's edge. It's scooting ever nearer the edge so I can see and hearing it crumble.

Beginning a story is like looking over the edge of a mountain, scooting out farther and scared the view might just sweep you off your balance.

Waiting for the new story is like scooting towards the edge of a mountain, frightened the view will sweep you off your feet.

I'm scooting to the edge in hopes to see a place I'd like to go, if I were to drop and I'm scooting out ever farther and just imagine if I drop and I'm scooting out ever farther, beyond my toes only clouds.

he suggested that you exaggerate things a little when you recount your stories, and I agreed. he seemed a little bemused by the idea, as though it's a bad thing to embroider a good story into a better one.

I might have agreed with him once, but I agree with you now. you're an entertainer, a storyteller, a modern-day bard without the lute. you tell the best stories, and if you exaggerated or embroidered a little to make them so, who really cares? it's a good story, and everyone laughs.

I've noticed myself doing it now too, a little bit. it makes my stories better.

and I still remember lying in the dark beside you, smiling though the gloom, whispering 'tell me a story.'

you tell the best stories.

I have a story to tell. I am going to tell it to my Superbestfriend because it certainly involves her. In the end, I think I love her. But that's stupid because I've only known her for such a short time. I am a stupid person though. She is a person who appreciates honesty, and so I believe she appreciates admissions of uncertainty. I don't know. I don't know if I love her. I think I love her and I want to love her, but I'm afraid my story will just make her feel bad. With this further uncertainty, not knowing if getting it off my chest will hurt her but deciding to still say it anyway, I don't know if that can be love. I don't want her to hurt any more than she has to, but I don't want to hurt either. I think ultimately she doesn't want me to hurt either, so it can be reasoned that it's not actually selfish to do this. It could be reasoned that it's selfish of her to not want to hear it, too. But you can use faulty logic to reason anything. I'm tired of hurting. I'm tired of dancing around conversations that might become tactless. I'm tired of the nauseous guilt. I'm tired of being too neophobic to get myself out of this rut I've been in for the past two years.

at heart i've always been a story teller. no more and no less. i don't really ever imagine myself telling lies, and truthfully i'm not a good liar, but give me an audience and a plotline and i will tell you a story to last a whole night and you will believe every word i say even though i precede every paragraph with "this is a lie."

sometimes i get so tied up in my own stories that i completely lose track of reality. i couldn't tell you right now what is true and what is false about the very core of my being. i have a plotline to my life and weave interesting stories, punchlines, tear jerkers around it. i tell these stories with embellishments and omissions. i tell them like some third party relating a mythos passed down for a million generations, i tell them like a little awe struck kid. yeah, so many times i start to believe them.

are they lies? i approach things differently every day, usually from whatever seems like the easiest and most reasonable route of the day. i really don't believe anything i say at 3 am anymore. i create an amazing, intriguing, frightening picture of myself from little scraps of stories and bullshit about how and what i really do feel.

the truth is that you probably are more right about me than i have convinced you of. i am indeed a total fucking crazy, nut job, inside and out. i'm probably going to fuck you over in the end because of the aforementioned problem with nutjobbery and pathological lying wrapped up in a pretty little package called fiction.

i live eight hundred different lives around you and totally enjoy pitching you head first into the throes of the most intense existential crises of your life. do i really exist? am i what i say i am? if i don't exist, do you? this is why you love me and hate me with almost equal intensity. have you learned to expect negation through my "maybe not"s yet? have you learned that at any moment my story might be exposed as untrue and i will then take a different path to the way it "really" happened?

maybe i am pathological. on the walk home i spend my time thinking of scenarios that might make the day more interesting and then practice them on all my friends. i turn life into a pitch for a screen play. i turn our most intimate moments into love poems to rehearse for someone else later. but i'd rather not admit this, or admit it in any way that seems real. i'd just like to say that i am a story teller and i'm honing my craft every day.

i really am more fucked than you thought. totally delusional and probably deserving of a long stint in inpatient treatment. but you love me because i make every day more interesting, don't i? i make your mundane life into a bestseller.

or maybe not. maybe this is all a story. you'll never really, truly know.

Meet Jack. Meet Diane. They've been dating for a while now, a year and half, that sounds like a good number. They're in love, right? Couples are in love after a year and a half. Hmm...

In the past 72 hours Jack has cried more than he had in his entire life. Sure, he's a man, but he's not afraid to cry. His heart was torn out of his body through his throat, then the love of his life shit on it and pissed on his tear-streaked face. Yeah... that just about describes these past 72 hours.

His girlfriend, the one he wants to spend the rest of his life with, fell in love with one of two people Jack truly hates. A man who constantly makes fun of him and makes him feel two inches tall, he loves to torture him by flirting with Diane even after Jack had told him that it bugged him to no end and after Jack asked him to stop. Bob and Diane have been flirting nonstop since October. Jack asked them to stop, telling Diane that he was uncomfortable and that he knew what was going to happen. She looked and him and laughed. Sure enough, the week before finals, Diane comes to UCLA to tell Jack that she's in love with Bob.

The only bigger insult would have been if Diane had fallen in love with Jack's father- the abusive son of a bitch who had beaten and ridiculed Jack since the age of eight. Those two, and those two alone, make Jack's blood boil and make him want to get physically violent and angry.

He asked her if there was anything there, and she lied to him. She told him all the time that they needed to work on their communication and that if Jack just talked to her about things they wouldn't have troubles. She didn't bring this up once. She didn't even bother to tell him that she and Bob were talking again, after promising her boyfriend that she'd keep her distance to avoid hurting Jack.

Last semester Jack messed up... big time. When Diane approached him about it, he thought for an hour, and knew that if he wasn't with her, he wasn't going to be happy. He knew that he loved her and that she could make him change. His feelings for her could make him change. Just like in those romance novels and television dramas, he had found the girl who would change his life forever.

Unfortunately, the man that Diane found who she thought could change her life was Bob. Jack still can't go half an hour without crying. In the last day it's been reduced down to a quiet murmur of pain laced with a few mostly silent tears.

It's a good thing this happened while school was still in; they don't know this, but Jack's friends have stopped him from doing many a stupid thing. Jack sneaks his trinkets of pain into his friends' rooms for a few hours until his moment of suicidal hunger dissipates.

Jack and Diane are still together, but he made her stay. The first night, he begged. He couldn't help it. He held on to her like he'd hold on to his last breath. The second night he cried and sobbed while trying to tell her to go to Bob. Jack knew where she wanted to be, knew who she wanted to be with. But she couldn't leave Jack because of his tears. How did she expect Jack to be strong enough not to cry when she tore his heart with her bare hands and she's just thrown it on the ground?

Jack no longer thinks they'll make it. He doesn't think they'll last through the summer. Either he'll die of guilt or misery, or she'll just change her mind. She hasn't kissed him with meaning in months. She hasn't attempted to faked being passionate about him for weeks now. She tells him that she's happy because they're together, but he knows better- he's not stupid. Naive- very. Immature- yes. Emotionally and mentally unstable- a little. Stupid- not in the least.

How long does he let her parade around like she's happy? How long does he try to forget that she loved another so much that she was ready to seal him up in a little box, and bury him in the back of her mind with the memories of childhood and other lovers meant to be never thought of again?

So much of Jack is hoping that she'll actually be happy one day. That she'll regret this whole thing and mean it when she tells him that he's her world. But the rest of him knows better. He just don't know which part will shrivel up and die faster. Then, and only then, will he know what he should do.

For now, he sits in his room, tears running down his cheeks, playing with his knife, secretly hoping he'll drop to have some excuse to bleed.

Sometimes I think about writing down my story. Writing about my life. Then I decide that my life simply is not that interesting. I mean, you write something down for others to read and I wouldn't want to bore someone with my story. I mean, parts of my life could be termed interesting but I find that on the whole, I'm not so great as to assume folks would want to read about me. I mean, that'd be strange. Although, if you're reading this now obviously you care even just a little.

When you think about it, most stories written about peoples' lives are pretty dull. Someone scribbles down their memoirs hoping to connect with someone else in the world but at the same time, one must wonder how much of what is written down is accurate and how much is simply the misconstrued image created by the author.

For instance, if two people are asked to write about an event that they viewed while seated next to one another, their responses will be vastly different. So, what do you do? Choose to enjoy both as they are written accounts of the human experience as viewed from the vantage point of two, wonderful minds. Eh, so much to ponder on.

I think I'm mostly just too afraid to know that someone is responding to my life as I've seen it. I have a lot of secrets that I would feel compelled to write down. There are days when I absolutely hate myself because of my views on myself and because of random memories that have presented themselves to the forefront of my mind. Sometimes the only thing that keeps the demons at bay is writing for me. Or painting, sketching, drawing, art in general really. Lately I've been struggling to keep memories down and away. It's like the holes are filling themselves in again. It worries me.

My story .... is .... long. It would be full of every emotion a human can experience right down to hopelessness which I think is the worst feeling imaginable. In that moment that you are truly hopeless one of two things will happen: death or a new life. For me, someone happened along and I started over, left my Parent's christian faith, and began to see myself grow again.

I have shared my story with two people, the whole story that is. One I worry I shall never be good friends with again, the other will be there always, even after death, lurking just over my shoulder, protecting me always. I know this. Somethings are just simple as the truth in my story. He is one of those truths. A constant that the equation demands in order to work properly. Granted, someday, the equation will pass to another function. Until then, however, he is integral in my life even though I do not speak to him every day. He knows me. He, I feel, often knows me better than I know myself.

if I wrote my whole story down, I would devote the final chapter to confessions that I'd gone the length of the story without sharing. I think that would be the most difficult part.