Storytellers

I have found myself meditating upon stories and those who tell them as of late. The tales that make you laugh. Get you to cry. Feel anger or abject terror. I am a sucker for a good story. Sometimes even a bad one, if the opening words are strung together just right. I get curious. It may be said that curiosity can kill cat, but I have no feline in my biology, and, aside from that, if a cat has nine lives, why should it fear one death?

There is a story in everything. That's the way, it seems. Some stories never get to be told. They are the ugly shadows and the undertow. The monsters that hide in closets and under beds. That metaphoric elephant, which everyone sees, but no one likes to talk about. The stain in the memory and upon the psyche. That nightmare, which whispers to you in the dark late at night when the demons come to tea.

Other stories can take years and lifetimes to coalesce. For the right words and puzzle pieces to slide together. The threads to be woven just so, like a spider spinning its web. To be able to tell the tale correctly. It might become buried under the layers and strata of other memories and tales, but eventually, when the time is right, it resurfaces, begging to be told, buzzing like angry hornets bursting forth from their hive.

I have been accused of being a storyteller once or twice, but there are some I have encountered, both in the realms of the flesh and across these spiderwebs of cyber, whose divinity I cannot begin to even touch. Once upon a time, I told someone I merely get words stuck within the walls of my skull and if I don't purge them out than I might go insane. Upon reflection, that might be an interesting metaphor, but it can also come across as being a tad melodramatic.

There are so many stories locked away in this maggot's nest I call a mind. And still so many more to find. One would perhaps require the lifespan of a star to tell them all, but then again, perhaps forever is not long enough. So it goes. 

And I sit in awe of those storytellers I admire. They are masters and I am a student. I do not aspire for their divinity, though I admire it. Why try to cash in upon another's uniqueness? I might find right and wrong, good and evil to be point of views, but the theft of another's magic is something I cannot abide. Instead, for good or ill, I might just try to get my own mojo working.