Stigmata

There are stories that you could tell a thousand times. There are stories that you remember until the day you die because of their vividness or their richness or their profundity. There are stories that leave a taste in the mouth, or a sting on the cheek, or a memory of a sound or an odor. There are stories that bear an awful weight, and freeze that one moment in your life into a stigma that you just know will keep bleeding its way into your soul.


And then there are those stories that do not really feel like stories. Having no beginnings and endings, these stories settle over its characters ever so thinly that there is a danger of never seeing it at all until time, in its eternal jest, pulls someone’s eyes upwards to see it. These are the stories that hold no deep, numbing emotion, cause no smarts, create no stigmas, draw no blood. Spanning years and years and years of regularity and prosaic calm, these stories have the quality of air. Not even of wind or of breeze, just of air.

This is the kind of story that I have. And it is a story I can tell only once, and without words. So listen to the silence, and feel my story.

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