Member-only story
The Stories of My Life
I want to write a story. My life is full of stories, mostly about my stupidity, a salient feature of my personality which has a certain style of its own, I must admit. But as soon as I get into the ante-chamber of the effort to recount one of my pratfalls I get distracted by the realization of what I learned from it. How it advanced my life.
I’m sure you can see where this is going, a story about how I don’t know how to write a story.
Well, it might be, but I can never predict when I start writing what’s going to happen.
As my mind plays over my bad decisions and ventures into dead-end streets, I see that most of my stupid moves involved money. But the moves I regret the most involved times when I didn’t help someone who was suffering, when I couldn’t imagine their plight, when I wasn’t kind. When I didn’t notice their pain. That’s a kind of stupidity I have a hard time forgiving, even if I “knew not what I did.”
I feel this about friends and family members, of course, but also beloved pets, or strangers begging on the street.
I notice this story is turning into a confession, more embarrassing to me than any sexual peccadilloes I may have been involved in as an errant youth, which frankly I’ve pretty much forgotten anyway.
