ab ovo

        I was a church-doubting child, bored by ritual and uninterested in doctrine. My only steady and unchanging faith lay in stories and I continued reading before bed long after the prayers had faltered and stopped. I don’t know what my dad thought as he sat on my bed with his hands folded and I steadfastly kept silent, but after a few days he stopped prompting. And we bypassed prayer for the book in his hands.

        Memories of my dad reading to me are all about sound. I lay next to him in my bed in Japan, in Singapore, in our first house in New Jersey and I listened to his careful way of reading, blanketed by his accent (Irish countryside—south east). After several chapters a night, he would fold over the corner of the page and quietly slip the book onto whatever was acting as a bedside table. Then I would then get a story from his childhood. These memories of his were rationed out like treats, only one or two at a time. My dad told me about being one of six boys, about my one aunt, about the cows, about trips to Clonaugh beach, about my grandmother, about vivid dreams, about my grandfather, about my mom. I drank in these stories. I emptied books into my head. Movies were replayed over and over again. I was an addict. I still am.

        Marc O’Connor was with us in Japan. He gave me a book filled with traditional fairytales from different countries. Some time later he gave me another in the same style. There were pictures with gold in these two books. I’m an aesthete, and a picky one at that. Gold was eye-catching amidst the colours and sometimes when I pull out these books, I still go straight to the pictures. I, of course, favoured some stories—The Mermaid, Inana and the Enormous One Tusked Elephant, The Lemon Princess, the one with two girls named Kate, the one about Baba Yaga Bonylegs, the one about the witches, the one about the king who tried to build a tower to the moon, the one with seven brothers and a princess with six fingers—and I read them frequently, like a religious girl referring to a holy text. Then there were others I didn’t read as much, usually because there were no pretty girls in the pictures: The Magic Fruit, The Dragon, the one about the boy who turned into a koala bear. These ones drifted away like dreams.

Before I learned how to write stories and poems, I lied. I still lie. The line between stories and memory is always blurry, even now.
But storytelling is hardwired into people, into us. Scrapbooks are filled with newspaper clippings, diaries are filled with memory, shelves are filled with books. Stories let us get lost. They let me escape even when there’s nothing to escape from.
It’s the beginning, which can’t be like a steel hook but rather like the warm scent of a cake out of the oven. It’s the characters and how these other lives get caught on and interfere with our own. It’s the end that feels like a pinch; it jars and leaves us staring at the mark that remains after the contact is gone. It’s finding a story again, rereading a book or rewatching a movie, letting the familiarity enhance the curves in the plot. It’s the cool fingers of a story closing my eyelids and hotly opening my imagination. And letting go.