Not with pen, nor keypad, do we write. No. But by tongue — between the partition of hello and goodbye. It begins at the onset of a first meeting. Hands shake and names are given. One probes further and the other writes — what I mean to say is that the other narrates, sculpts for his inquirer his own character. Out of a barrage of facets that make up your life experience, you carve out a persona that stands apart from the kind of indeterminable creature you have been set out to be, by the uninformed acquaintance. You, in essence, try to fit the three-part, million word trilogy into a children's storybook. With pictures. We all do it. Me? Yes, I write too.
"Rachel," I say, "Rachel Lowry"
"How do I keep myself busy? Why, I would say my busyness keeps me, rather than the other way around." Yada yada yada.
For some, we give trinkets, "I have never had a cavity." For others, we supply the given, "I studied at the Y. English. Yes, I write." For most, I avert the usual. "Never mind how old I am." For many, I digress. "I find poppy seeds a strange thing to be considered eatable." For the few, I implode with some exciting something to say. "I haven't given up on the idea of living in New York yet. Maybe in the fall." And my acquaintance does the same.
I, like you, have lived long enough to have one hell of a good story or two to tell. And here we sit before one another, talking of ghost towns and New York in the fall. Yet for most, we keep our lips pressed before divulging those deep wells of what give us our drive. We hold this portion of ourselves for later.
But for a few. For them, we share because we sense they need it more than we do. Because sometimes, our agenda is irrelevant and these experiences are not ours to hoard. And so I string my story and you string yours.
And then there's always the fear that our tale will be inaccurate, that our telling could never really show the way a moment still trembles beneath the surface of our skin some ten years later. How i wish this falling short of truly knowing somebody weren't the ever-present reality.
But then, how beautiful is the attempt to share this round thing we call life with the other. As I eagerly wait with my lips parted at the edge of my tea cup, to be given a trinket or two from a new acquaintance across the table, as if the sharing of it were the whole of our being.
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