Five minute narratives
Place
I’m going to be blunt, but not as blunt as I could be. I like to spend a long time on the toilet (no. 2). A friend once told me that I could get hemorrhoids from sitting on the toilet too long. I think the benefits outweigh the risks. It is a unique place, the bathroom stall. Sometimes I read or write, other times I think or listen. Anne Lamott writes that God is in the bathroom. She sees this place as a space to escape the world, have some privacy. But it’s not always private. The sound of the door to the bathroom suddenly shatters the peace as someone turns the handle and enters the room. He picks the stall next to me. I feel a sense of communion as we sit mere inches from each other, completely hidden, but together: thinking, listening, reading, writing.
Person
My mom is the queen of lists. There are three places where her reign is most apparent: her office, her car, and our house. Sometimes I think her life is a list and her brain matter is stacked in rows with little bullets next to each. It is her conduit to sanity, to being organized. She doesn’t forget things. I do. She asks, did you make a list? No. When she tells me things important she asks, did you write that on your list? Do you have a list? No, no. Merely through osmosis, though, I have picked up the habit for it seems 60% of the surfaces in her list-lands are adorned with post-it note stickies of about 60 different shades of fluorescent pink, blue, yellow, orange, green.
Epiphany re: the world
It was probably one of the greatest epiphanies in my life, when I understood what Bill Clinton meant in his graduation address last spring. Build community in the world. Bring the traits of the community you are so fortunate to have at Middlebury to the rest of the world. For the only way humanity has any chance of succeeding or even existing is to be rooted in community. We must see each other – feel the fact that every person on this planet is significant, important, crucial. I can only exist if you exist. We are nothing by ourselves, we are nothing alone.
Alone
It was isolating, stifling. The pressure of fear made it almost impossible look away. I was staring through the window on the door of the one room guest house of the cottage on Lake Sunapee’s Great Island. It was that feeling that no matter how much reason or sanity told you there was no murderer, no drunk stumbling through the trees to open this door and chop me up with an axe, I was sure it would happen. It would happen to spite my calm voice of reason, and I would die. I stared out the window at the rain buffeting the pines, my nerves in unison, on edge, for what felt like an hour, until I drifted into sleep.
People
We worked almost eight hour days, probably talking 20% of the time, thinking, listening the rest. Sometimes it was agony – the hot sun pulling beads of sweat from our skin and drying the windows before we could even begin to squeegee away the washing fluid. Other times though, it was near summer time bliss. Beneath the shade of the trees, a cool breeze circulating through our loose work clothes, the windows a gleaming fluid reflecting the world behind us, we shared a view known only to the window washer.
of all your mini-narratives, i like the last one, “people,” the most. you grounded it so much more with sensations and observations that it felt real and genuine, it took me there.