My thoughts today are about story spaces and the stories that we fail to tell ourselves. After all, we are in the midst of our own stories. What or where is the story space for those of us that live alone? I suppose it could be said that anytime anyone is listening to the radio, TV or any screened metallic voice, stories infuse the air around us. Little difference from a group of friends meeting around a table in a coffee shop, or just a husband and wife at their kitchen table. But I am specifically interested, quite selfishly I suppose, in those of us that live alone. When I turn the radio or the TV on, it is often to hear the sound of another human voice. (Cats have a very limited vocabulary and I’ve never really understood feline linguistics.) Today, I listened to and watched a news story about the women in Afghanistan being left behind by the international community. Women fearing for their very lives, their freedom and their futures. Relief is not on their horizon.
There were three of us at this electronic kitchen table. Myself, the news reporter and a young Afghan woman residing in Norway. The news anchor and the Afghan woman were interviewer and interviewee. I was the shy quiet person, sipping coffee and remaining silent outside the story space ~ invisible to the others, behind the screens and within my home’s privacy. Such outside world stories connects me to a greater world that filters into my singularity like the light rain on my windowpane. I have reminded myself that I do not have to live in fear.
“We are like islands in the sea,
separate on the surface but connected in the deep,”
~ William James
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