Sunday, March 8, 2009

Stories

It is strange how places can remind of the ways in which life shifts around you - almost without your notice. I am back in my old room, in the place where I used to write so much. I am sitting facing the same wall I used to stare at when starved for inspiration, looking out the windows that are so familiar, listening to the old silence broken by the low burbling song of crickets and frogs in the night. So many things are different and so many things are the same. Both seem to highlight the changes in my life, the changes in me. Some things about me have changed so much; some other things, hardly at all. Every time I come home I am conscious of how deeply familiar everything is, how comfortable and soothing. And yet uncomfortable... I still feel a little like a visitor here. I slide right in to my role at home, but I can't forget that I'll be leaving again.

Right now, though, I am content in the stillness and the solitude that is so abundant here compared to school. I like solitude, it comforts me. Solitude is exactly the thing that is nearly impossible to find living in a dorm, so I am trying to soak up as much as possible while I can.

North Carolina is such an odd place to live sometimes - snow on Monday, nearly eighty degrees and balmy by Friday. Now I can hear the chorus of frogs in the creekbed that tell me it is spring. There was never a sound so full of life as that one. It reminds of springs past. I am both eager for the future and desperate not to let the present moment get away from me. Spring is good for making me wake up a bit, but it also ruins all my focus for school. My academics have been uncommonly hard for me this semester. I can't wait for summer. Yet, I don't want summer to come, I just want this semester to keep going...

It's all very mixing. Like most things. I am realizing more and more how complicated it can be to get close to someone, how scary and new. But, oh, how wonderful and dizzyingly rewarding at the same time.

I am also realizing more and more how stories hold people together - common, everyday stories of The Things That Happened to Us, and Do You Remember the Time When? These kinds of stories hold my family together, they make up my friendships, and they grow with each day, creating layers of meaning and narrative. Slowly, these remembrances create the glue that holds people together... And perhaps it really is as Salman Rushdie said: that freedom means being able to tell your story without anyone telling you what to say or how to say it.

And maybe that is why I keep coming back here to write.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

and freedom also means there will always be those who want to hear or read your stories because they are interested, respect your right to tell the stories....AND they love you!
Happy to be glued to you....Chicago Ant

Bruce Johnson said...

Excellent post. You sum up the feeling that all of us have had at some point in our lives....and hopefully will have again and again until the end.