I tell stories.
It's what I do.
I tell what happened and how it felt and why it matters, what it meant. I explain jokes I never told.
Sara the freshman calls it vulnerability, Martensen calls it authenticity. There's strategy to it, I suppose. You want somebody's trust, you want them to open up the curtains over their eyes and knock down their walls, you've got to earn it. You earn it through your own stories. The bad ones. The ones you don't want to tell.
It's a trade. It's money. You take everything that's ever happened to you and weigh it into categories of worth and bargain it away for the trust of others. It's sales practices.
It's what I do.
I am cut into pieces, ready to give away, choosing customers with strategy and predetermined intention. It took a while to realize I don't tell stories because I want to tell them.
You start with a syllable. You stop, and start again. You finish the word this time. It's not a stutter, it's getting a hold on the weight of what you are about to say before you say it.
You tell it all, just how it happened. You say how it went from warm rocks to cold water. You feel it rise in your chest, as if raised from the dead. You raise it again and again. It's your money. It's your worth. You buy trust with vulnerability. You wear your heart on your sleeve because you know everyone else has one and you want them to feel safe with that fact.
Or maybe you just don't care about your own heart all that much. Maybe it's just live bait.
The stories don't leave when you tell them. The weight doesn't go away. You either feel it or you bury it, but it's always inside you, and it never leaves. It is only a matter of resurfacing. Then you lie awake in the cold of the dark and feel the remembering in your chest. It is worn and faded and pulsing like an unhealed wound. You breathe it in and breathe it out and wait to forget it again.
You don't.
It's your money, and you spent it, and it never left.
You want it to. That's why you sell it.
The remembering has its own weight, its own worth, its own pain, as tangible as oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and it sits in your lungs and presses against the walls. You remember me, it says. But it is quieter now, less agonizing, more bearable. You can breathe around the remembering. The more you awaken it, and stir it around, the sooner it remembers how to settle.
It seeps back into the marrow as you fall asleep in its arms.
It's what I do.
I tell what happened and how it felt and why it matters, what it meant. I explain jokes I never told.
Sara the freshman calls it vulnerability, Martensen calls it authenticity. There's strategy to it, I suppose. You want somebody's trust, you want them to open up the curtains over their eyes and knock down their walls, you've got to earn it. You earn it through your own stories. The bad ones. The ones you don't want to tell.
It's a trade. It's money. You take everything that's ever happened to you and weigh it into categories of worth and bargain it away for the trust of others. It's sales practices.
It's what I do.
I am cut into pieces, ready to give away, choosing customers with strategy and predetermined intention. It took a while to realize I don't tell stories because I want to tell them.
You start with a syllable. You stop, and start again. You finish the word this time. It's not a stutter, it's getting a hold on the weight of what you are about to say before you say it.
You tell it all, just how it happened. You say how it went from warm rocks to cold water. You feel it rise in your chest, as if raised from the dead. You raise it again and again. It's your money. It's your worth. You buy trust with vulnerability. You wear your heart on your sleeve because you know everyone else has one and you want them to feel safe with that fact.
Or maybe you just don't care about your own heart all that much. Maybe it's just live bait.
The stories don't leave when you tell them. The weight doesn't go away. You either feel it or you bury it, but it's always inside you, and it never leaves. It is only a matter of resurfacing. Then you lie awake in the cold of the dark and feel the remembering in your chest. It is worn and faded and pulsing like an unhealed wound. You breathe it in and breathe it out and wait to forget it again.
You don't.
It's your money, and you spent it, and it never left.
You want it to. That's why you sell it.
The remembering has its own weight, its own worth, its own pain, as tangible as oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and it sits in your lungs and presses against the walls. You remember me, it says. But it is quieter now, less agonizing, more bearable. You can breathe around the remembering. The more you awaken it, and stir it around, the sooner it remembers how to settle.
It seeps back into the marrow as you fall asleep in its arms.
