I think that you can view people as stories.
These stories intersect, certainly, and entwine and affect and shape each other, but they are still each a story all their own. Sadly, a vast majority of these stories are those trash romance novels you find in bins at a garage sale for twenty-five cents apiece. Now, they parallel romance novels not, of course, by their content, for most people's lives are rather boring on the romantic front. Which may be why they end up unknown, small, crummy, tattered paperbacks who've never even been in eyesight of any Best Seller list. But they're romance in their formulaic-ness. They all tell a very similar story. A story of working by, maybe with a few minor challenges, and a few highlights over a multitude of years. They perhaps get into the college they dreamed of since they were young, do something which gets considerable notice of the media, lose a loved one far too early.
Yet even though these stories are all completely original, no two alike, they are still boring as snot. It's just a fact, everybody responds the same way as in a billion other stories, no one does anything substantially out of the ordinary or has any supremely distinguishing features. Of course, there are the few brilliant shining star novels, which come out in multiple editions with different bindings, and sometimes added footnotes and commentary, that have dozens of analyses done by grad-students and published by professors all over. But these are clearly the exception, not the norm.
Of course, I realize that I will most likely not be a Best Seller. I will probably end up in someones front yard in the discount bin, along with all the rest. But still I want to distinguish myself among all those others. I want my life to be fresh, interesting, different.
I want to be the dirty old type-written stack of pages bound with masking tape that sits at the bottom.
It was written by God knows who, and has been revised all over in a thousand different colors of ink, faded from the years. The person running the garage sale doesn't know where they got it, or how it got into that bin, but they sell it to you nonetheless. You plunk your quarter down, and drive home, the story sitting alone in the passenger seat. Walking in your door, you kick off your shoes and stride over to your chair. Turning the T.V. on for a little background noise, you flick on the lamp next to you and begin to read this filthy manuscript. An hour passes. Two. You read and read and when you finish, you look up to find that the day has disappeared into the ether, and it's four of the next day's morning. You get a little bit of sleep before heading off to your job, but the story stays with you. The twisting plot, the unorthodox writing, the characters themselves keep you thinking all through the day.There wasn't anything unusual about anything in the story on the surface. Plain setting, plain people. But the main character. They thought like no one else. The way they live their life and the way they thought changes you. Imperceptibly at first, you begin to fell the book's impact on the way you are. You shift slowly, but you change over time to the point that you are almost a completely different person, living the way you think people should live, not the way you are expected.
And then one day, you notice a friend. They live in a small bubble, never working beyond what is expecting, what other people want. And you want to help them.
And you remember the story.
And you introduce them to it. The sum total of people who know about this story increases to two, only two, but regardless, the world is a different place due to it. Maybe not different for the good or bad, just different.
That is what I want my story to be.
