This story begins on a cobbled street, the glow of street lamps reflected in puddles. The few people that are out, are moving this way and that, they huddle together over tables, talking, a song plays through headphones, a heart is lifted, a breath released.
It also begins at a beach where the sun has newly risen. A man approaches, shovel and an orange plastic bag in hand, he starts to dig and begins to explain. He's got rage, he says, so a friend suggested a punching bag, to let it all out, and so he came to the beach to dig up sand and carry it home. Keith is his name. After a fist bump, he, his gold tooth and his thick accent toddle off down the lane and away from the beach.
Or this story begins sitting on a hill in the golden glow of the setting sun. Just to the right, a couple are on a date, the first or at least early on. It's not going well. Some people are taking photographs. The sun moves across the sky, the light grows milky and the kind of golden that burns itself into your memory because, surely, light only ever looks like this in the movies.
This story also begins with a photograph from 2020. I took it towards the bottom of the Royal Mile, not long after sunrise, on my way to Arthur’s Seat. It was a sunny cloudless morning but the streets were deserted. I peered down Closes, catching glimpses of the hills beyond the Firth of Forth, and I remember thinking how strange it felt to be the only one out. But of course, at the time, it wasn’t strange at all.
„We live as authors of our lives alongside others.“
Ocean Vuong at the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2022
Time changes how we remember things. It smooths down the edges of our emotions, takes off the peaks, we embellish the rest with stories to fit in with whatever we’re trying to make ourselves believe. In the end sequence of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie sits in the back of Patrick's truck and in the voiceover he says that "these pictures will all be stories one day" but that "right now these moments are not stories, this is happening."
We are all of us storytellers. We perceive a slice of the world and the rest, we make up. Stories help us make sense of our lives, we use them to make meaning, to fill in the blanks left by people’s words. The stories we make up in our heads are preferable to the uncertainty of not knowing, of being left in the dark. Everyday we write fairytales, we create heroes and villains, we fill gaps and we rewrite when we gain new information. Sometimes the stories we tell to fend off uncertainty, fester and turn against us. Occasionally we tell stories to lie to ourselves, consciously or unconsciously. We are all the villain in someone else’s story and it’s easier to hide from that than to face it. Other people also write stories about us and these are sometimes the most difficult to shed.
In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit considers life as a whole Milky Way of events in which the present rearranges the past. Instead of every choice we make leading unavoidably from A to B, we pick out constellations to make meaning of our lives, of us.
“The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.”
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Just like Rebecca Solnit, I wonder if maybe our lives are less like one coherent story but more akin to a collection of short stories. One in which the narrator remains more or less the same but the characters change. Some may appear in more than one story. Maybe they have disappeared for a while, having gone through their own stories, before they reemerge, changed. Or there may be characters who shape one story before they disappear but their impact is felt long after.
I once went to a reading with Ocean Vuong and he criticised the West’s fetishisation of the Hero’s Journey which forces every story to contain a conflict that inevitably leads to a resolution, a release. In Kishōtenketsu, a Japanese but also Chinese and Korean storytelling model, there is no conflict but there is always a twist that’s often humorous. The characters don’t have to grow, sometimes there’s barely any action at all, but the reader gains a deeper insight into the story during the developmental stage.
"We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or hate, to see or be seen. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then become a story-teller."
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
In the past few years I’ve been trying to hold space for uncertainty, for the complexity of stories. Being in this uncertain liminal space means getting comfortable in the unknown, in the place between stories, in the waiting. In Waiting for Godot, Bertolt Brecht tells the story of Vladimir and Estragon who wait, you guessed it, for Godot, telling each other stories of what must surely be about to happen. Yet nothing ever does. Cornelia Funke reassures us, however, that every story begins long before “once upon a time” and never finishes at “happily ever after”. So who knows, maybe Godot did eventually arrive. We will never know the whole story.
Accepting this means leaning into the unknown. It’s a place between coming and going, between no longer and not yet. You have already left but not yet arrived. It’s a long plane ride and the moment before the first kiss. The moment when you think you know, but you don’t know, what happens next. It’s the place after the leap but before the fall or before you take flight. It’s a space of rebellious hope and unrelenting vulnerability.