The Story Teller
The air is scented with an acrid smell of that element; everything is doused with a little bit of the same, old constituent. The same route we cross brought something, different. The indelible memories fading as we passed them by. Everything. I've known too much paradox; enough to create my own. It is the world's prominent element after all, but somehow in that dynamic, permanent seat, something surfaced. It stood out with trepidation, the moment I sat beside the seat of the Strange, Story teller.
The story teller shouts his story in the most silent way; his voice undulated with a great deal of secrecy and amplified by some facade of intensity. He is adept in cutting stories short and keeping most to himself; his audience quite small and his listeners, smaller. I became his Listener. Not a new thing for me, I sit patiently and waited. What the others didn't know, might never know, is what happens after he closed the book and the red curtains were shut and when the darkness swallows the scene. That's the only time, I truly heard him.
Convolution, it is the first reaction from the few words; words that seemed to materialize. I watched bemused as the papers crumbled into dust and spread over the place, molded perfectly as the words inflicted. You don't hear the stories, you feel them anchor your beating heart and imprint in your running mind; you see them in his eyes as they blink away the scenes.Confusion diluted as the feeling recurred and slowly I understood. His eyes, staring intently and misty with a gaze that pierce your soul, told me such stories of sort, genuinely untold. I never did become a part of the story nor did he; but we created a new one. We blended in the stories so effably, they changed. Ropes of reality unmooring, I sailed forth to the altered stories. I became a believer.
He professed all of them were real. I believed, because the tangibility is excruciatingly suffocating. Or it is suffocating because I believed so. The world had done a crucial job to bind me again in its gravity; along the shore I've always ambled and stumbled on. The world's assaults were deflected by engaging, captivating and brooding stories we've shared and made. I was too far off and I almost breached that line I've dwelt in.
The conspiratorial force deigned its effect but it is their nature to fade and begone. I lost the special seat, the reality I've conjured were transported in somewhere, in some other world where the stories are incessant and are not made to end. You tried to reach me, of course but then the line deterred you, the currents swept you away and fastened you firmly. I would've crossed it but you stymied the search and there I saw the vacant slot already occupied. That was easy and baffling, I became lost; stranded in some unknown island and not knowing if the very land is real.
The words we enclosed ourselves with are still existing; though we are now settling in the spaces between. Spaces which are devoid of meaning, feeling and sense. It's a hush when it's already quiet; the sensation of burning without fire. You see, we're still along the lines which are now in a complete disarray. I became one of your stories. And you became mine. It is the exact moment another story teller was born, inside the depths of imagined worlds, within me. And even with enough audience, she still waits for the one listener that is, him.