Half told Stories

The wounded storyteller.

He woke up from his siesta with a dream-story about the city of Leeds at night with a vivid milky way overhead. He didn’t have his notebook and anyway his eyes wouldn’t come into focus, so he couldn’t write it down. It was taking him longer than usual to wake up. He lay there awake but with his eyes closed.

He promised himself he’d remember the story and its magical aura, but he forgot it almost immediately. He just remembered the night sky and the feeling of an infinite magical universe.

Why Leeds? He didn’t know. He had never been there or wanted to go, even when his daughter married a boy from there when she was living in London.

He noticed a feeling of impossibility, of worry that it was fiction, this story, and therefore not something he would be able to complete. He never could finish his made-up stories, like it was a mountain he couldn’t climb, shouldn’t try to climb.He felt that telltale tension in the gut, that blank space in his mind, that old habit of an impulse to abandon the idea of creating a story. There was always the idea he wasn’t talented that way, that he should go back to what he knew he could do, write exposition.

But he still wanted to make a story, he wasn’t sure why. He dreamed stories. Everybody dreams stories. Why is it so farfetched to think it was possible…