Confessions of a Lonely Storyteller

Photo by: Lisa L Peters © 2017 'No. 2'

The kettle gently whines as a salty breeze blows wildly through the room. I ride it into the kitchen, where I revel in the steamy sound of the water hitting my cup. I look out onto the terrace, past the charming workman's table to the beach. The sun is rising. Gulls circle and swoop. It's going to be a beautiful day.

Fade out.

Better yet, cut!

It's all wrong.

I need to take a break. If I smoked, this is where I'd light up. But I don't. I've never smoked. I've never once greedily inhaled the seductive curl wafting playfully from a dangerously red ember into my lungs as if to declare, "You're mine now. I've captured you. I own your soul and you'll never get away."

Instead, I navigate the maze of discarded clutter through the narrow path I've tunneled for myself in order to travel the twenty feet or so from one broke-down memory to another. I visualize an old maritime topography featuring the once pristine leather couch which now doubles as both my workspace and an island separating me from the world. I imagine the sporadic, twirling dashes charting my course from here to the filthy, decrepit refrigerator, loudly whirring, a shrine to my failures, a reflection of all the sins I've unwittingly crafted into a daily drama of scarcity, chaos, and struggle.

There is no tea kettle. There is no tea. And while the ocean beckons from three miles westward, I rarely chart a course to there. There is no terrace. Only a thin plate of glass refracting a distant sun through decades of dust. The window creaks in agony when coaxed along its neglected track, revealing a rickety collection of stairs which dare me to plot my escape.

So I do not open it but shuffle past to slide my fingers along the seam of the torn insulation of the refrigerator door. Breaking its impossible seal is the only way to pry it free. I stare at dense piles of indeterminate items, many of which have long ago petrified. I've collected them over the years to create an illusion of abundance. Or maybe I'm just too weary to throw them away. I grab a can of sparkling water and a hunk of cheese and prepare to tackle the turnaround trip back to the couch.

I am a storyteller. I've always been a storyteller. I spin most of my tales deep inside my head. It's always been this way. I was told from a very young age that no one wanted to hear them. I believed very little of what I was told but somehow I believed that.

And so I sit. On my broke-down, second hand couch. Staring at my piles and piles of accumulated junk. Unable to plot a course in my head to begin to weed through the mess. The mess in this room. The mess in this head.

I sit on this couch and tell myself story after story. And I can no longer discern which ones are true. Perhaps I never could. As each one forms, I greedily devour it. Into my head. Into my psyche. Into each cell and fiber of my being. As if to declare, "You're mine now. I've captured you. I own your soul and you'll never get away."

But as I do, it dawns on me: maybe it's the other way around.