Telling Stories

The initial title of this post was 'The Stories We Tell' but I later changed it to the current one because I was listening to Tracy Chapman while typing and when Telling Stories came on, I decided to publish a post in her honour because she is awesome like that. Anyway, I started reading The Way Life Should Be by Christina Baker Kline this morning while taking breakfast. I am still on the first few chapters but I love the book already. I love characters like Angela who make me feel like if they were real, we would totally be bffs because we have so many things in common. I read somewhere, I forget where, that you know its real platonic love when you are having a conversation with a prospective friend when she says something and you exclaim, 'Me too!' and when you pee together. Okay, that peeing part is a little creepy.

Anyway, the moment I met Angela, which was on the first page, I could totally see us peeing together. I was like, 'Oh My God, why are you fictitious coz I can see us having brunch on Sundays and catching up over drinks after work, or having lunch together ( maybe she is one of the ladies who lunch, I am not sure yet, but I will find out soon coz I have a late night date with her for the next two nights).

This instant connection was further enhanced when she decided to call the guy from Maine and in her head she already had the story she would tell her grandchildren four decades later on how grandma and grandpa met. This idea of creating stories for you to tell them later is what made me think that Angela and I are similar. But unlike her, my stories are for a wholly different reason. I tell myself that maybe I should attend event 'x' so that I have a story to tell my friends when we next meet. I tell myself to read one more book so that when I meet someone new, we just might get a common ground to start story telling. I tell myself that I should create time and watch that new film or tv series, so that I have something to contribute when we start talking about what's new on tv. And I get to tell these stories; my lunch dates go from 1pm to 7 in the evening! I always say that I will marry the person whom I can to talk to the whole night till 9 am.

I live for stories. I live through the books that I read. And each day is an opportunity to create a new story. It is therefore up to us to choose the type of story we want. We may choose to have a cliche story that will bore you to tears or you may choose to create stories where you as the main character will embrace your idiosyncracies and live hedonistically without guilt. And to me that's one story that I would love to tell on my death bed.