The way I tell the story to myself
An aching afflicts me, an inclination to discern a harmony amidst the incongruous notes of experience. I perceive atoms which at times find sporadic stability. External energies appear to persuade their state.
I am in a current, created by a force which passed through this space long ago. The matter above me is warmed by an unknown source of energy. My current grows cooler, sinks deeper, moves slower. I am ignorant to both gravity and my own movement with the tides. I am oblivious to a release of an energy which will in time attract me, envelope me, destroy me.
Gaseous, dynamic atoms collide rapidly. Constant friction and agitation. I tell myself a secondary story, violent and unnerving. Liquid, balanced atoms flow with the vicinity. I tell myself a story of acceptance, tenderness and prospects.
The way the story told itself to me*
I was born in 1986 and grew up on the east coast of the US, in an in between space, equidistant from two great cities. I grew up in a modest, former farming town that was nonchalantly being taken over by the rich. Subdivisions replaced blueberry and hay fields.
I was the youngest of three children. Levi was the oldest, and Bekki was the middle child. And I had three best friends. Robin Hood our family dog, an English Springer Spaniel, was my first. Then Nikki, who lived at the other end of the road. Her and I were inseparable for our first ten years. And Rinny was the person whom I bridged that time between child and adulthood with.
A mom, a dad, three kids and a dog, on a square plot of land, which lay half way down the lazy hill of Old Smoke Road. I would move away at eighteen, to one of the great cities, to attend public art college. Four years later I would move across the Atlantic, to Germany, to Berlin. I ran there, away from a story I did not want to be a part of anymore, and I stayed for a story I believed in, but a story which was not my own.
* "The way the story told itself to me..." Zora Neale Hurton, American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist