Storytellers

I was waiting for a train at the north station. A woman bearing heavy loads entered the hall, sat down on the floor not far from me. She made room for herself in the middle of all the foot traffic, began speaking out loud, speaking to anyone. Settled and intense, surrounded by gunnysacks and baskets, she recounted story lines that stick to my skull and rib bones to this day.

I could see her face from where I sat, and with all the forgotten lives she elongated, all the familiar dilemmas she pronounced, with particular lilt to her speech and her ringing tone, she was really asking, "What do you ever do that is not done face to face? What is your life if not in part the lives of others?"

She spoke new fables that were the old ones with new names, reinhabited ancient places I remembered the instant she mentioned them, that I can point to somehow now. She spoke new fables that rang a solitary truth, had answers I have not since been able to find in books. I had been lost in the realm of billions and trains and nation-states, lost within the boundaries of dogmatic masses. The simple plots and infinite plainness I heard about living that morning near my northbound platform have not dimmed in the slightest with their light on me. I can recite all the words and I'm not even sure what language they were spoken in.

Such is the nature of the many-sided bittersweet, the real. Such are the ways of the story and teller, immanent, unexpected, expected, unnameable, named, irrecoverable, untranslatable, incontrovertible and mortally wise.