Writers Jam

You could say this is one story, or two stories, or many. Just as a trickster shapeshifts into many forms, The Story morphs endlessly. Just how much of the caterpillar is still in the butterfly when it breaks out of the chrysalis? Is it eaten whole by imaginal cells, or simply metabolized into a different form, a new story? This one with wings.

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As I stand in my apartment kitchen next to my mother, I too am I immersed in two tales. My life here, my life now & all the things I have not yet been able to bring to light of her eyes. In her soft nudges to go sit down & eat my food before it goes cold, I am squeezed unrelentingly through a portal into another, familiar story.

One that tastes like innocence, like simplicity, like nurture. One of being fed & loved. But also, at times, being misunderstood & judged. As I am slowly crushed under the weight of our measured silences, I wonder when the truth will let up.

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What will put the anxiety of this heart to rest? Is there anything to put to rest? The day I left home to come to this strange, unfamiliar land, a split in my timeline occurred. Since then, I have lived between worlds, between parallel plots, between the dark, velvety folds of liminality.

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Love & fear are both stubborn, & this makes them god-awful co-directors. In every interpersonal (or intrapersonal) exchange, two perceptual realities unfold through two interacting lenses — each one touched & transmuted by the other. A dance, if you will. Stories as symbols. Symbols that our brains — these pattern-recognition supercomputers, are excellent at recognizing. If you’ve ever let your attention linger on the intense negotiations between the internal judge & the internal victim, perhaps you understand. Stories are heat signatures, radiating softly & unapologetically from all that lives, all that is alive. In me. In my mother. In you.