When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.
You say you want a happy ending, but neither of those words is really what you’re searching for. For instance, you will not live to see a just world. But you will live to see acts of justice.
Perhaps the thing that is even more overflowing with possibility than a crush, is love. In whatever form it takes, from whatever context it is drawn. With a crush after all there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it. It will bloom or it will whither, but love, love seems to have infiinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once.
Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.
If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?
When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.
Even from an early age, my parents imbued in us the knowledge that although life wasn’t just, we could always do something about it.
Everybody loves Elmo, right? Elmo is a closer. Elmo gets all the Glengarry leads. Elmo stares into the abyss and the abyss whispers, “Tickle me.
The storyteller says, ‘I am here. Does it matter?’ The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, ‘I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.’ It seems simple but it’s a bold declaration.