The Story That Hides

Some stories love to be told and some stories will fight you if you try to tell them. Part reality and part perspective, these never-new stories are universal, having already been spun across different cultures, religions and eras. Within each of us sleep the exact same stories; the difference being that whereas some of us live them and are provided the circumstance to realize and tell them, others are not.

Stories come together when actions are organized just so. When telling a tale, these words fall into the proper order and arrangement in their effort to communicate what the universe has chosen as experience.

Before a story is told, her words vibrate inside of us. Love knows when she will be used alongside Tenderness as equally as she knows when she will be used alongside Betrayal, reminding us that intuition does not belong to humans alone. Intuition is God Grace living inside of our bellies.

When these stories are not being told, they are weeping because they know. They know their turn is coming. They weep for each and every single storyteller past, and they weep for each one to come. They weep because human nature will never change, no matter the trauma we so readily inflict upon ourselves and others.

Words, in their infinite arrangements know that extent of humanity’s cruelty…

& since the world’s stories have all been told, they know us better than we know ourselves.

These are the secret stories – no matter that they have been told repeatedly throughout the history of worlds – that never want to be told. It’s these stories that, when we try to tell them, fight us. They pray that with each telling, it is the last. They beg to remain unnoticed, for unlike other stories, they have no ego. What they have is a reserve of pain, and because pain always has heart, these stories don’t want to force that pain onto their storyteller.

Quietly, these stories sit. The anticipation of the story itself we perceive as a knot in our stomach; the first sign that a very small gust of wind has skimmed the story, and it starts to become undone, anticipation growing in anxiety. As a wave, this anticipation grows in height, and is pushed faster and stronger with each rise, becoming more destructive the closer her words comes to the surface of experience and breaking through to telling.

While it tells itself, it does not do so in a harmonious manner but is composed suddenly of several interfering stories and feelings communicated at different frequencies and speeds.

As varying structures of vocal tracts conspire to speak, beyond control the words chosen articulate a betrayal, a trauma inflicted on our hearts and spirits. Once this begins, the storyteller is no longer in control. The anxiety of the tale is all consuming and the fight between individual and story is always lost to the later.

Depending on the weight of the words, a variation in the air pressure inside the person is experienced. This pressure pushes other words into corners and creates gusts of violent wind hitting the sides of our brains and hearts with such force that we can not but let the words crash against one another as they tumble out of our mouths, our eyes, our entire body’s expression. Friction and energy are created. Words crash and rub against one another and through a bloodied birth, earthquakes shake our bodies as these stories tell themselves.

Frenzied, the words chosen rip out in a fury. They have teeth and claws and razor edges; they bite at our tongue, stab at our gums, saw into our teeth, and use their letters as tenterhooks against our lips because these stories are dripping with the shame that is testimony to human weakness. In their haste to escape this all-consuming shame, they fall out one after the other, one pushing the other, one running over and flattening the one before.

And as they tell themselves, the storyteller’s body and heart and spirit are left peeled and hanging by thin ropes of flesh. We are torn and we are bloodied because we must allow for the trauma of this telling. The story tells itself and we become displaced.

We must allow for it…

For it is only after her telling that we can once again breathe. It is only once these stories have broken to the surface that we can then offer our bloodied insides the time to heal.

Once this story has fulfilled its destiny, we are calmed.

With time, the words chosen in the telling of this story are replaced with softer, gentler, more understanding words. The tale is no longer filled with jagged edges and razors, but rather one that has come to words of understanding and forgiveness and kindness…words that reshape its edges, remould its spirit, cut out its claws and file down its teeth. This reshaping cleans the stains, removes the poison and carries the older tale, dead, to its proper burial.

This is the story that hides.
We all carry at least one, and I’ve lived mine; she no longer leaves my lips shredded and my tongue torn on her surfacing.
I pray that yours doesn’t either.