As I writer, I choose whose story to tell and whose to let go, what to say and what to leave out. I shape the narrative so by the end my reader reaches my conclusion, or close enough, the World according to Sue, or at least a world according to Sue. Perhaps there was a time when I believed 'The End' was truly the end and that happily ever after was a place like heaven, a location, a destination. No we are creatures of movement, of change, and our stories change as we do, an expected ending not an ending at all, or at least not ours. Of course now I question endings, having gone through one of my own and found my story still evolving, me still becoming. And I write myself as I read these days, page by page, moment by moment, so few things cast in stone.
My stories have become more spacious too. I always believed that stories needed space, pockets of emptiness that the reader could slip into and inhabit, just enough left unsaid that he or she could fill in the blanks and make the story his and hers. And that spaciousness in writing can be calculated, placed by design, or it can become your nature, your given, an unconscious graciousness, an invitation to co-creation, this is not my story but ours, come write it with me. I don't when it came to me that this is how I am living now, with these same spaces, letting life work with me instead of tenaciously filling every detail in so there's no space for serendipity, for magic, for anything but my own rigid beliefs at what is possible.
I think I realized how I had changed as I began to tell people I was leaving this life and beginning another. People want to know, not all of it, but enough to make sense of it. And I could have told the story of an unhappy marriage and the man of my dreams, but I didn't. Not because it wasn't their business. Those that know me, know I'm not afraid to use my life as fodder for rumination and growth. If individuation is the goal, then all of it, at least for me, should be examined under the harsh light for wisdom. No, I didn't tell a set and detailed story because I don't know the whole story and because I felt the kinder thing, the greater gift, was to give them enough space to write their own tales, come to their own conclusions. If it made them feel better to write the tale of "there but for the grace of God," or "thank God that's not use," then fine. And if they wrote a tale of their own shadowed heart and unfulfilled longing, then that was fine too. I gave them the bones of my story and let them sing it to life into whatever form they wanted.
By nature we want to know the whys of things. Unpredictability makes us nervous. I get that. On the savannah it was a matter of life and death. You kept your eyes open, looked for patterns that said you were safe or you were prey. But this need to find patterns, to fit everything into the boxes what we know, what we can understand, leaves no space in our lives and without that space, for me at least, a kind of hopelessness came because the world was only what I could imagine it to be, all the other possibilities falling away. In the world I found myself this last December, sick, working at a place I had spent much of my adult life leaving and coming back to, my daughter getting closer to heading off to her own life, my marriage not really a marriage but two lives lashed together with history and fear of alone, my future stretched out before me, each and every step, and I found myself thinking dead was not such a bad thing.
It wasn't love that changed everything, at least not in the way we traditionally think. It was the space love made, that first tiny hint of possibility that entered my life story that was followed by another and another, until I could no longer see "my future" at all, didn't want to see it, just wanted to live it day by day, step by step. Love brings many gifts. I suspect each love brings us something we need at the time. I suppose, best-case scenario, it's progressive revelations; we love as we can, and are loved as we can be loved, each time hopefully deeper, wider, longer, fuller. It's the space of this love that's the gift of it, beyond all the other blessings it bestows, for in each and every gap and span, hope resides, and worlds dreamed of and yet to be dreamt. This is the magic of that gap between God and Man on the Sistine chapel, myriad futures, chances and changes, loves known, guessed, and out of the blue. This is how I want to live the rest of my life; this is the story of me I want to write, full of holes where life can bestow upon me miracles. And this is how I will live, step by step, and with each backward glance will I know my path at that moment, understanding that every step, I know it anew.
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