LRL Concepts

I am a storyteller.

I want to tell a story today.

I don't know where it came from, but I can see this woman when I close my eyes. Not all the time, but often enough that it needs to be said.

Imagine her. Brown hair, brown eyes, brown-olive skin, and bright white teeth. She loves mini-skirts but never wears them. She adores pink, but owns not a thing that could be remotely compared to that color. She's wearing a pair of ragged jeans and a t-shirt with the picture of a fish jumping out of the water. The clothes hang loose on her, and that's just how she likes it. Her favorite pair of shoes are clogs that have a fuzzy soft lining inside and a yellow ribbon outside. It all seems to have been chosen from three different wardrobes randomly, but oddly enough, it all seems to go well together.

She has no name. Or at least, I have never heard anyone utter it. So I'll just call her She.

She is out for a walk. With no particular purpose in mind. She walks 10, 20, 30 blocks. In one hand She is clutching a cupcake, and in the other a debit card.

She enters a store, complete exhaustion settling in. She hasn't really walked any more than usual, but today She feels utterly exhausted. Her mind wanders and lives in a state between a complete blank, and a frenzy of random thoughts. There is really no better way to describe, and even if She tried, it would be a waste of time.

To the store clerk She gives the impression of loneliness. Why, I don't know. She's not actually sad. It's impossible to be sad when so many thoughts, and none at all roam through somebody's head. Sure, there are things She could definitely change in her life, but nothing that makes her so totally miserable. But the clerk -or in today's fancier terms, the "customer assistant"- is not her psychologist, or a therapist, or even qualified enough to quantify and label her state of mind.

She wants to say a few words before she loses her mind. Maybe She'll scream them and then completely forget them. It's the only way She'll finally get it all over with. So She says the first words that come to her mind: trance, color, caudal peduncle.

Jolene (according to the clerk's name tag) doesn't know what to say. Jolene doesn't know that She has been reading about fish recently, or that She watched an existentialist movie about the power of color. So to Jolene this woman seems just plain crazy. But I know better, do I not. I know the dimensions of this woman's thoughts. Or, at the very least I think I can understand them better.

The truth is her coming in this store has nothing to do with color, or fish, or being in any kind of trance. She is just trying to give a name to what She's feeling today. The cupcake didn't tell her, and it didn't make her feel any better. After all, She wasn't really hungry. Retail therapy didn't help her name things, either. In the end, she just wants to keep her hands occupied for a little while. Just enough to help her figure out what is going on in her mind.

A couple of red hand-made papers catch her attention. They remind her of Christmas, and Saint Valentine's put together. She doesn't particularly like either holiday, but she does love red. And this paper is red in the way that red should be: deep, beautiful, involved.

There aren't many people in the world who would understand this. Red is not just read. Just as pink is not just pink unless it's perfect. Spend all the time and money you want, but if it isn't the right shade, you've just wasted your time. There are more important things in the world, of course: getting yourself a nice wardrobe to impress a potential employer; get a second degree so that you always have something to fall back on; date people who you're not entirely interested in so that in the future you can look back and say you dated enough in your younger years. But this doesn't matter to her. It never has.

She asks Jolene to give her $200 worth of paper. I is all she's got left in her bank account. She's not sure what she'll do with so much paper, or what she'll do for food later on, but this kind of compulsion usually works itself out into something useful. Once you create that kind of momentum, things are bound to go somewhere special.

Jolene is happy to take her money. Jolene doesn't work on commission, but certainly this will impress her bosses. No matter that a purchase like this doesn't seem to make sense. Jolene is just happy to get rid of this woman, who doesn't seem to be all there.

She takes her deep/ beautiful/ involved red paper out of the store. Her hands now fuller than before, her head still empty and in complete disorder. It is not clear what these things will accomplish. If she'll actually use them at some point, but all this exertion of energy must be good for something.

I want to write about this woman. I want to paint her in a canvas. Her, and her mind deserve to be immortalized somewhere. Not for any particular reason. But just because that's the way it should be. That is what makes me a storyteller. Not a painter, not a dancer, not an actress. Simply a storyteller. And not a good one at that. But who the hell cares. Just as long as I get to tell her story.

LRL

 [She]