A year or two into our relationship he told me that he had recently realized that I come from a lineage of storytellers: my mother, my father, my sister, my nan, my grandma, my grandpa, my great-grand father, and on — all of them born to tell you a tale.
“But that’s not all,” he’d said to me. “Your friends are storytellers too.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
He told me how, when we got together with my friends, that instead of small talk, instead of a random scattering of topics, it’s just an exchange of stories.
“You save them up for each other,” he said. “And then you tell a story, and then your friend tells a story, and then another friend has their story lined up and on.”
He told me that he wanted to tell stories too. He told me that, as he wasn’t used to this way of conversing, he wanted to practice. He wanted to refine and polish a story so that he, too, could join in on the exchange.
“I tend to get lost in the details,” he said. “My stories are too long and boring.”
So, he practiced.
H…