Story Eaters

This is the book my father’s mother gave him, and nearly half a century later he gave me. A tatty old book that opened up to me bright rivers of words that sing in my mind still.

 

As a solitary teenager, I read anything I could get my hands on. My mother went back and forth to the library while I was at school to keep me fed. I scoured my parents' bookshelves and read whatever caught my eye, age appropriate or not.  Why? Because I loved stories, because I wanted to escape, because I wanted to taste existences I did not have courage or lifetime enough to inhabit.

In these habits I was just being human: we are story eaters and can never have enough.  These endless permutations of words are sand whispering along a breath that began in the beginning and never stopped.  They are waterdrops streaming through fingers that will hold their memory as long as flesh lives on the bone.  They rise from their river beds to become clouds on the dusty wind, that will fall and reassemble on the grateful earth below. They gather in pools that shiver with facsimiles of the stories they once were, and we take from them and give each other to drink. And the thirsty ground takes what is left and pushes forth green shoots that become the crops on which we feed.

I have a reputation among my friends for storing memories.  How?  Because they became stories.  Schoolfriend Helen, aged 13, wrote in her Battle of Marathon essay, "There was much death on both sides.  And in the middle."  I told this snatched delight to my family over dinner.  I'm still telling it to this day.  I make sense of life’s challenges by finding the narrative. I trace my feelings back to their origins and mix them with remembered things and those ever shifting stories are me, whether I enjoy them or not. 

I am a story eater and I can never have enough.