Collections of Clichés

I was born a talker or at least that is what I'm told. This tendency I repressed throughout my childhood since I was neither popular nor noticeable  My peers didn't much care for what I had to say. Despite this, I sheltered my little garden of stories, tending to it in secret until suddenly everyone wanted to be different, to stand out, to grow up and then I let the stories escape.

You might not know it from meeting me, but I do love to spin tales and above all, make people laugh. Not in the stand-up comic kind of way however, although I have nothing against that method (I try to catch some shows at the comedy festival every year), but I choose to draw humour from the telling of stories. The Lad teases me, saying that I was born in the wrong era for my tastes. As much as this might be true, I still feel that my sense of feminism would be misplaced in any other era. Insomuch as the art of rhetoric is considered among the highest to be attained, I sometimes feel I missed my boat.

A well placed cliché can be very effective, triggering comforting nostalgia in a reader/listener. While this might be considered laziness on the part of some story-weavers I see nothing wrong with turning to tried and true methods. They are, of course, clichés for a reason - they work.

Times are that I will feel the whispering of a new story, it taps lightly on the back of my neck like a playful lock of hair. Climbing up the marble steps to my classroom, wondering at the surface of the steps, worn concave by decades of steps. These are the physical manifestations of echos. I run my hand up the banister, looking at where the stain fades, where touch has occurred most frequently. I could think of this in terms of building safety, which I was trained to do, but I cannot bring myself to such things.

Stories are better. Stories live in the faded wood and the worn treads of steps. I will never know them all but I can strive to weave my own. Whether they are found and read at some point is not as important to me as the fact that I have written them down. While I would like to be true to my nature and talk and talk until my throat is raw and my cheeks are sore from laughing I will, for now, tuck my stories away until they're ready to bloom.