Thanks for the Reminder

Reading stories makes it undeniably clear that if the world is in fact organized by an all-knowing, all-powerful solipist, it isn’t me.

Phew! Thank goodness. It’s not my fault.

There were a few months in college where I dreaded that posssibility, hoping that if there is one being who imagines the world, it be that girl with the scooter who we called Scooter Liz or the guy with the bag pipes, anyone but me. I practied opening the door to my room every few minutes one night half expecting a black void where the kitchenette and the floral couch should be. Maybe I’d catch God being lazy. It was so tiring obsessively checking that reality still played outisde of myself like a new parent listening for heartbeat. Thank whomever-may-be-God that we have stories to succesfully surprise and move us with insights and juxtapositions we cannot credit to ourselves. Reading makes the world bigger and pushes back the proximity of that void. That “why didn’t I think of that” jealous pinch when reading something new adds a layer of optimistic wonder on my walk to work. Passersby deserve their own focus. Minor characters have siblings and phobias and might be writing songs in their heads. We all are authors and knowning that makes me desperate to listen and watch the characters who otherwise appear in the periphery.

“The Thing in the Forest” by A.S. Byatt was just one story that reminds me. Byatt tries to describe the impact of human emotions--pain, war, loss, maybe even childhood, age, death and the rest of it--as a monster, or an object, well, a thing at least, humping its way through the woods. Like a spongey, expansive blob vacumming all it touches, the thing is a combined experience that grows even larger and disorderd as it moves forward. I love that stories sprout questions not answers. What if the combined weariness of millions of people was alive? What would it look and smell and sound like? What if it was a real thing that could touch you, that had a face? What if two little girls came upon it? What would they say to each other? How would they remember this as adults? Would they be able to say anything aloud?

I was sixteen when I made it to the state Future Business Leaders conference and it was my first chance to watch swaths of people. I’d been to NASCAR races with thousands more before this point, but my focus then was on the smell of burnt rubber and fear of not finding a safe place to pee. As a teenager watching over four thousand students my age flow past, mushrooming from the bottleneck of a doorway in the Hershey hotel, I was mesmerized. It was a parade of potential. Everyone had faces! They all wore tights and blazers. Their march was continuous, moving on and on and on and I thought, “Wow. They’re all alive like me.”