A few weeks ago I started this post and it was intended to be about my brothers, leading off with the oldest. I've since deleted it.
A few years ago something happened and I thought, WOW, that's a story. THE story. My story. I never told anyone.
I have two jobs that keep me comfortably below the poverty line, but they each allow certain freedoms and leisures. Friday I have my morning tea while watching a PBS series, Stories From the Stage. I like a good story. The books I read, the movies I watch, the media I consume, all very story based. I've journaled since I was 15, I am doing some form of that now. I don't actually know why I do any of this, why it's my necessary. We've been doing so for years, collectively, historically, intimately. But why?
When my story happened I couldn't wait to tell it and then never did. Good as it was, telling it is something else entirely. It required ego or maybe a specific kind of ego that thinks anything that could happen to a person is something someone else should give a rat's ass about. They don't.
What matters to us just doesn't matter.
This is my big life takeaway. I am still working out details. We live in a narrative that injects importance into biology; we are animals that reproduce to preserve the species, but in our case - and maybe other species I've not asked them - we appoint narrative that makes it more meaningful than it is. We make it meaningful. We feel the need to attach a certain meaning and importance to our every actions and activities. So that now, all day long, we post selfies. Selfies with food, selfies with pretty backgrounds, selfies with funny backgrounds, day selfies, night selfies, selfies with friends, selfies laughing laughing laughing, mouths hyperextended with joy. WHOTHEFUCKCARES? No one. You. Not me. No one else.
This thing, need, that we all matter is killing me. What I would give, had I the means, if everyone would just SHUT UP for 5 minutes. Anyhoo...
The story I so wanted to tell , the one that is pretty good, never once since it happened naturally fit into any conversation. No door, no window, no inadvertent crevice ever presented itself. To tell the story I'd have had to hijack in the most unnatural of ways the attention and focus towards it, and, ergo, towards ME. It'd be a total selfie. Doing that was more than I could ever stomach and my story would remain, remains, untold.
We are a species drawn to story, but does every gesture, thought, moment qualify as one? Who gets the privilege of story and what is the eligibility of being heard? When is this thing called life simply this thing called life? Where does story end and self-indulgence begin? Am I not now writing, are you not now not reading one big indulgence? Yes! And I continue to peck away at it. The comfort is that though I am indulging, no one is there to hear it so it's not making a sound. A real win-win.
When I started this post it was to be about my brothers, my oldest brother leading off. It turns out I know nothing about him. There were a good amount of paragraphs that were a whole lot of nothing. No, the story wasn't about him, I finally saw. It was about my need to atone for what I didn't know. What I allowed, what I chose, and what it came to be. I was wrong about so much, everything. I'm so sorry, to no one, and I can't do anything about it. I can't fix it. And I can't pretend to look good trying to, which is what I was doing. I deleted it. Except for this one story:
We were at my father's one visit - it may have been the same visit as from the previous post - and because it was some kind of occasion people were coming over. He and I are standing next to each other in the entry way, there are introductions happening and in the middle of this, WHILE IT'S HAPPENING, he says, as an aside so magically subtle no one but me could have heard, "No, YOU must be Don Francisco's sister." Everyone talks about Annie Hall, no one ever talks about this, possibly my favorite Woody Allen movie. It hides obscurely in the oeuvre. It's one of the most magnificent moments of my life, if you must know. Like we knew each other intimately - something I suddenly wished all my life but never missed until that moment. Here it was, two-seconds to serve a lifetime, two seconds that weren't enough.
