A Storyteller

My roommate brought home her friend Sam.

Sam was an attractive man.  Tall, dark, and lanky, just was my type.

My roommate had such interesting friends.

She was interesting, herself.  She was a peculiar, shining soul, filled with Buddhist drive and love.

Sam was her schizophrenic homeless friend.

Whom she had not known for long.

I sat, minutely in terror, and mostly with utter fascination.

The things that would fall from his lips reminded me of Andy.

Andy, the classmate who took one too many hits and never came back.

I laid back in my recliner.

Watching Sam.

Allowing Sam to take me on the rollercoaster ride.

The propulsion, the launch that comes from trailing on another person’s emotion.

I began as a drywall ceiling tile.  In the path of a left turn lane in the middle of a busy intersection.

I was the drywall, lying in wait to be crushed.

Dragged into dust.

Minute white clouds, billowing with every lap.

Beaten down, broken up.  I was the tile.

But our dust would swirl up, and I flowed upwards, landing as spider on the grill of a truck turning left through a busy intersection.

I clung for dear life as I went for the ride of my life.

Wind blew me, threatening to pull me into the tunnel of air that flows under the hood, surely burning me up instantly.

Wind blew me, threatening to whisk me away into unknown– but certain– death of free falling onto a busy street.

When I could hold no longer, I let go.

I swirled and grasped and gasped and landed in the drivers seat of a woman in a breaking down sedan.

I became the woman.  But I wasn’t me, I was a different woman.

A woman with unruly curly hair.

A woman with more attention on her side mirrors than the road in front of her.

I was worried.

Worried about my lipstick.

And worried about the party I was going to.

Alone.

When I got to the party, I walked in past a marble door, smoothed my beaded dress against my soft curves, and looked into the fire blazing in the chiminea next to the front door.

I was drawn in.

I became the fire.

The fire that burned deeply, singing my fingertips as I laid back in my recliner, hanging on to the wisp of story that flowed out of Sam’s mouth.

Words tumbled across his teeth and over his lips.

And I rode them away, lost in my own story.

Minutely terrified, and mostly fascinated.

This.

This is why I watch.