story

Tell me a story, Pew.

What kind of story, child?
A story with a happy ending.
There's no such thing in all the world.
As a happy ending?
As an ending.

(excerpted from Lighthousekeeping by jeanette winterson)

memory is a funny thing.. particularly for a right-brained person like me. i can't remember details to save my life, in fact i often have to do the math to calculate how old my boys are and sometimes i can't even remember if it's left or right-brained that makes me like this.

and when it comes to my life, i remember the emotions and the snapshots of the story but i can't bring up the chronology of how things have changed with any degree of accuracy. maybe that's why i've journalled all my life. when i was a kid i used to feel as though if i didn't record it, it didn't happen.. perhaps foreshadowing the way my memory would function, or dysfunction, as i aged.

in an effort to clean out a drawer last night, i ran across some old journals. journals from adulthood. these tend to be in shorter intervals than my childhood and adolescent versions. notebooks i've bought and poured into them a few months of heartache and torture and pivotal moments. then tossed aside with more empty pages than full...

in the words i read there, i relived and remembered and then reshelved those stories, relieved they were captured on paper rather than in my mind. i'm often complimented on my 'forgiving nature', but i know that it's really just a symptom of my selective memory.

now i'm having feelings and experiences that i don't want to ever forget. the compulsion to write and write and capture and try to wrap words around indescribable feelings and thoughts - it consumes me.

a story, a story with no ending, but very certainly a beginning. and i don't want to lose a second of it.

d: a story that unfolds as beautifully as it's opened.
b: hard work paid off in compliments from the corner offices.
g: an opening that compels me to write.