Searching

I think we fall in love with artists because there is a canvas of some sort…whether metaphorically or literally. There is something to project ourselves onto. Or maybe this us and we I speak of is only me. I find that an artist leaves room for interpretation. The art can be as literal as I need it or bend under the sheer force of my will to be something else. The extra soul in a song belted out becomes a secret joy that I can almost touch, the verve in a painting the mysteries I’m still panning for in life’s river, the writer…oh the writer…catching my life in phrases that I then spin into novels. 

Who doesn’t want to be understood that way?

The thing about artists is that for the most part they are throwing themselves out into the world. Maybe doing the same thing I described in reverse. Showing the world their scars, their triumphant smiles, looking for…if not the match, the complement to whatever is they have put on display. 

With age it gets more difficult. People seem to be…not so much set in their ways as set in the ways they talk about their ways. The stories we tell are the stories we have been telling for most of our lives. They are our greatest hits. 

Unlike Prince or Outkast – we are not willing to step out on faith secure enough to share newer incarnations of ourselves and to trust our fans to taste our new flavors and not spit us out in disgust.

We, instead tell the same stories. We, instead, sing the same songs. We, instead, offer the same lamentations.

I wonder if part of it is that by this point in my life I have people who have known me the better part of a decade – more than a quarter of my life. At this juncture they have seen me become who I am and were probably there for half of the stories I tell. And so those stories- the ways we tell them – become touchstones for us. Familiar points on a map that lead us home to each other no matter the changing terrain. 

Now there are partners and children. Now there are careers and life changes. And we are not on the same paths, sometimes not even on parallel ones. Now, our togetherness is a maze of webbing we have purposefully strung about. Tied this story of my car accident to your ankle while you have tangled the story of your week-long hike through the desert in my hair. 

In that way we are tethered. Almost invisible lines that keep us grounded and connected. That keep us. 

And for all the wonders of being kept, maybe tethering ourselves is the wrong way to go about it. Maybe changing the narrative- hell, changing the entire story is the way to go. If the classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, is the result of telling the story from a different perspective, maybe we all need to try a rewrite. Maybe I do.

Try a new perspective. Hell…try to dig out new stories altogether.

I have my stockpile. The polished and entertaining stories that I tell for any number of reasons. The time I almost got deported from Lesotho. Fleeing from hurricane Katrina and then doing recovery work in New Orleans. My head going through the back window of a car. 

They are all true. They all tell pieces of the story of me…only they rarely reveal anything. Not because there isn’t anything revelatory there, but because of the way I tell them. Hell, because of the way people hear them.

I dated a man in college who broke my heart. More than our romantic selves, he was my friend. He knew me in a way that few people have taken the time to know me. We fought, we hated, we parted, we made amends. Years later when I was living in Liberia he emerged as an important fixture in my time there. He wrote to me and I wrote to him the way that I wrote to everyone – forgetting he would not receive it the same way. 

I shared the same observations of stormy nights that kept me awake because of the stories of ex-combatants prying off the bars on the window and breaking in, their movement masked by the thunder. I wrote about my community not greeting me in the way I was accustomed to sub-Saharan communities greeting (hell, them not greeting at all, just staring in a stony vacant silence). Most people simply nodded on paper. Shared a bit of their day to day and moved on.

But he was listening to my story. He was applying my story to the me that he knew. And so his response to what I’d shared was personal and raw and sacred and beautiful. It was his hand on the small of my back or tangled in my hair, assuring me that in the cacophony of the world around me…I was heard. 

Of course, he was a musician, so maybe I was distracted by his art.