Captive audience seemed interested and so I continued to spill the beans.
I spun the yarn in the yard decorated with gauze webs, jack-o-lanterns and little skull lights strung with care along fence rails and from auspicious tree branches above. Candy dishes still overflowed and a to-die-for dessert table off to the right was heavily stacked with sugary treats, but my story kept their attention still. Even the bar was not a more tempting distraction. Is it me? Or is the way I tell it or is it both? OR am I just really rude and overbearing? Maybe all of the afore mentioned. I don't know why, but sometimes when I tell the story, which I realize has become "my story", I can captivate and it baffles me.
What I realize is, that sometimes in the repetition of things over time, we reveal, even to ourselves, details that went unnoticed or were too obscured with minutia, or maybe those realities beneath the surface of the story were too painful in the past to look at, listen to, even for us, the teller of the tale.
I've come to understand that there are a few monumental moments in one's lifetime that literally define us and we have no control over what they are and when they happen or why. Much as we may seek to create these life changing events, select the time and situation which shall mark us to ourselves and to others, to establish us as who we are and how we will be known or seen, it's simply not that way.
Catching the ball, making the play, wearing the red dress, breaking the silence, socking the bully, delivering the eulogy, throwing the drink in the face and sauntering away - these things may make you memorable, but they do not make you. They will not alter you irrevocably internally. They will not be your story.
Your story chooses you. Your story happens, occurs, presents itself when it's meant to and not as we mean it to. It is not often what we'd script and I'm pretty sure that if possible, most of us would select something more appealing or less restrictive or well, just anything but what is simply put upon us by fate or God or whomever is in charge of the universe, but that is not how it goes.
Last night, for no real reason, I repeated one of the two stories of my life, there are only two that I can recognize as life changes at this time, but maybe there are more hidden in the things I do not look to. Last night, in the telling, I heard something new. I had a reality about it, about the changing thing and about me, the changed person and although both of those things, the story and the stor-ee seemed rather unlovable to me, I felt a love for them (myself and my situation) that made me more sympathetic and a bit stronger, more respectful to myself for having dealt with, grown accustomed to, accepted, and I'd go so far as to say, having embraced what is my life due to my unchosen story.
I woke this morning thinking about the second story, what I know for sure was one of those unexpected, undeniable, monumental events that seemingly, randomly took place and changed my life irrevocably. I thought of it as pure luck, one of the loveliest possible, freakishly good, most perfect happenings that could ever befall a person, but in many ways it has proven more painful and hindering then the un-ignorable true wreckage of my first life changer. I realize though, that we cannot judge a book by it's cover, nor a life changing event on the day it took place and still we cannot judge it/label it and it's effects even on this day, the one we are currently placed in. We never know how these things, these events, these changers and changes will come to aid us or slay us over time. We simply can't tell how our story will go, none of us can, not until we reach the end of the book, the book that is the story of our life.
Long, long and interesting may your tale be.
