Lead Grinder

There are stories you hear that are ordinary stories, festival stories you hear every year, stories that tell you what is important and how to keep it together and how to make resolutions and exchanges and what one might expect will happen, and then there are stories you don’t hear so often, stories that are only told at initiation, stories people try to distract you from really listening to, and when they see that look on your face, they say, “That’s not about you, dummy.”
And you wonder what is about you after all and what it is about you after all and why is everyone so goddamned miserable, damned if you do and damned if you don’t and don’t think you can ever come back here again.
All I ever wanted was to belong somewhere and I never could quite get it. I’d be in the thick of things and hooray, but it wouldn’t last. People would start cycling stories closer and closer together such that soon there was the tedium of hearing the same story every single day, or suddenly they’d stop mid-sentence, and make a hand-gesture, that you finish the sentence for them – how is one to know how it ends if it is not one’s own story, and even then. I would tell my own stories and not hear a word. Not anything. One time I tried a different story every day all summer long, trying trying trying to find something to say that would make a difference, turn the key, a catalyst of untried alchemy; and then the chief came up to me alone and asked if I knew anyone who was prepared to speak at harvest council.
No, certainly I know no one and nothing at all. I was too ashamed to say I wasn’t getting on with anyone, anymore. The harder I tried, the more they stared at me dumbly. I was about to break from the pain. We were supposed to belong together, we were supposed to be the same, interchangeable, even, but I was different. I caused trouble with no mischief even in mind.
I would run away weeping in the night, run for days, until I might be consoled by another people. A new young friend would find me by the water’s edge and we’d splash each other and play tag and it would be the easiest fun I’d have had in a long time, and near sunset, he’d ask where I was going and I’d say I had nowhere to go and he’d say, “C’mon, dummy, stay with us!” And so I would, and make myself useful, inasmuch as they allowed and there were always funny rules that didn’t seem to make any sense to me quite yet and I would be reluctant to say the things that came to mind lest the chasm begins to grow again.
At times I was surprised to find a chum or group of pals who would fight for me, and say, “Watch it, he’s with us!”
Was a time I had a friend who would sit and talk and we could not stop and white light would split into rainbows around us and we both giggled like tinkling bells tied to lambs in the meadow running after clusters of daisies just a few romps forward. He liked my ideas and gave me advice and we made stuff up and it made sense. He never said he didn’t have time for me but everyone else told me so, and when he died his mother stood by me and spoke strangely, and the order was wrong. I could not correct a grieving mother, and what did it matter, anyway. The light was bound together again tightly.
What was compromise? What was belonging? Perhaps it was all just singing for supper and coffee and resentment. But if I had that kind of friend again, I would choose him over an army of others who claimed me and I would not let anyone tell me different.