The Storyteller

The soft thumping as Ramona ran her fingers over the book spines sparked an oddly satisfying feeling. She turned slowly, her eyes climbing the never-ending shelves. They seemed to reach the sky and beyond, as if there were no ceiling in this library. Or was it a bookstore? Try as she might, she couldn’t quite focus her eyes well enough to tell.

“Am I dreaming?” Ramona asked out loud, to no one in particular. She’d heard about this phenomenon…realizing you were in a dream, and thus being able to control it. What fun! She took in the space around her. It was as if she were enclosed in some sort of turret, the walls fully lined with books, the scent of musty pages and beloved words tangible and soft. It was quiet in a hushed way. There were ambient sounds, if only she could listen. But it was like the ceiling-slash-sky—she couldn’t quite focus.

“You’re not dreaming,” a voice said, and then—everything morphed. The room seemed to shorten and widen, and while the books and the shelves remained, the ground grew, dance floor-sized now. In the middle, in a navy velvet armchair, sat a woman.

“Who are you?” Ramona asked. She was still convinced it was a dream, but she couldn’t deny a strong sense of spirituality. “Are you God?”

The woman chuckled. She had long black hair in braids, dark skin, and kind eyes that sparkled. “If that’s what you want to call me, okay. But no. You know who I am.”

Ramona sat down in front of the woman, her legs crossed like a child, looking up with the eagerness of a kid at story time. Ramona was pushing fifty, but right now she felt young and unencumbered. Briefly, she saw a flash of pain—lower back aches and the ankle she’d broken years ago and the constant dull headache from poor sleep—but just as quickly as it came, she blew it away. Here, seated in front of the woman she apparently knew (but did not) she felt free and rested and enthusiastic.

“Tell me,” Ramona asked, not knowing exactly what she was asking for.

The woman smiled again, gazing at Ramona with fondness. “Look at this,” she said, gesturing grandly with both hands to all the books. Ramona did as she was told, and now the walls themselves seemed to be revolving around her and the woman. “What do you see?”

“Books!” Ramona said. More than anything else in her life, she loved to read. She remembered being eight years old, hidden under the worn tapestry of her handmade quilt, flashlight in hand. While her father screamed and her mother cowered (no, she wasn’t thinking about that, not here in the dream) she would devour books, one series after another.

The woman seemed to know what Ramona was thinking. She tilted her head ever so slightly and Ramona’s eyes felt pulled in that direction. Standing, she walked to the row of pale green books, recognizing their covers. She knew that now, years after she’d fallen in love with them, marketing had changed and modernized the characters and the cover art. But these were her beloved stories, the adventures of a gang of preteen girls, in their original green hardbacks, held in jackets with the old yellow lettering.

“Oh!” Ramona gasped. She still had her copies, somewhere, but they’d been boxed up for so long she’d forgotten about them. They had saved her (and there it was again, the specific timber of her father’s voice when he really got going, the void where the silence lay that meant her mother had shut up and was trying to pacify him with meek submissiveness. But no, she was not thinking about this now.)

“I loved these,” she gushed, opening one and swearing she could smell her childhood bedroom, the sweet scent of lavender laundry detergent that clung to the sheets that her mother washed more than once a week, her desperate need to clean an attempt to make life normal, to make it something other than what it was: a woman living in fear of a man who couldn’t quell his anger.

The woman smiled. “I know you did,” she acknowledged, and then just like that there was another book right next to them. Ramona knew this one too, by heart. Speaking of hearts, hers was beating fast, the way it always did when she thought about that time in her life. Even though he was long gone, when Ricky came to mind it still made anxiety come alive inside her, a match set to newspaper. She had been able to push her violent father and her tumultuous childhood out of her mind, but this was invading her in that way Ricky always did. She had spent years in therapy trying to learn how to stop giving him her energy.

“Oh, shit,” she said, pulling the book off the shelf. It had been the first memoir she’d read, and the title had called to her when she stood inside the bookstore, her toddler son playing at the train table. She had never read a memoir at that point, having always gravitated towards good, character-driven fiction that gave her escape. But this one—The Alcoholic’s Wife—seemed to dance in front of her, tauntingly, as if saying isn’t that what you are?

“Why am I thinking about this now?” she asked the woman, her hand flipping through this book, remembering the life that was no longer hers. How she'd thought she would read it to understand why it was so hard for Ricky to resist booze, to understand him and help him and return him to the person she knew he could be, if only he didn’t drink. She'd thought the book was some type of manual for how to manage a marriage to an addict.

It was not. Instead, it was a very eye-opening portrait of a man who was an alcoholic, and the deep sadness and trauma that gutted him, right down to the ways he repeatedly hurt his loved ones, especially his wife. It wasn’t that Ramona wasn’t trying, she learned; it wasn't that she couldn’t save their marriage because she didn’t understand the intricacies of alcoholism. It’s just that Ricky was unsalvageable.

“That book helped you leave him, didn’t it?”

Ramona turned to the woman, tears glistening in her eyes. “It was terrible,” she said, holding the book to her chest, remembering the fights and the lawyers and the way her son had clung to her, too little to understand anything but fear. She remembered reading The Alcoholic’s Wife so many times—at first with the hope that Ricky would have some breakthrough, some undying need to go to rehab. Later, because she had fallen in love with the story; because it reminded her that Ricky’s demons were not her problem.

She returned to the shelves, and suddenly, she realized that every book was one she knew intimately. There was the coming-of-age literary novel she’d read until it was dog-eared, on lazy summer days between college semesters, feeling somewhat normal that the graphic descriptions of the main character’s inner monologue were not unlike her own.

There were the racy smut novels she’d read in the hospital when her mother was dying, because she needed something to pull her as far away from that reality as possible. She’d revisited them a few years later when her father—with whom she no longer had a relationship—suddenly dropped dead. She couldn’t make sense of her overwhelming grief for him, which seemed so much rawer than the grief for her mother. Poorly written novels about clandestine affairs with one-dimensional characters provided a diversion from those feelings.

“Oh…” she suddenly sighed, seeing the non-fiction book that had steered her back in the direction of reading memoirs. The influencer days weren’t quite a thing when she’d picked that one up, but the inspirational life story of this woman—who was an author and a speaker and a self-proclaimed manifester—had propelled her to step out of her sadness. It had recalibrated her thinking, planted a seed that said your life is worth something. Your past does not define you.

“This one changed my life!” Ramona exclaimed, turning to the woman. She was about to tell her the whole story…how the book drove her to start counseling. How the years of working through therapy lined themselves up with going back to school to become a therapist. How she’d begun writing articles (anonymously, of course) about her job and the struggles of her own clients. But she realized, as the woman’s dark eyes locked hers, that she already knew.

“Who are you?” Ramona wondered again.

The woman didn’t answer, but instead proposed a philosophical inquiry. “Do you think these books shaped your life?” It was a broad question, with many possible interpretations, but Ramona didn’t even hesitate before answering.

“Yes.”

In between the stories she’d pulled out were dozens of others that had been important in smaller ways. The children’s stories she’d read to her son when he was small, filling the quiet space at night when Ricky was at the bar. A Tale of Mr. Smith: the engrossing, fictional saga of an abusive marriage and a woman who stayed. That one helped her understand her mother, and why she’d never been strong enough to leave. Fifty Minutes was a compilation of a therapist’s most difficult clients, and that had led her to start her article writing, when she realized that if she was careful and protected privacy, she could share what she was learning. And what she was learning was so profound, so simple.

Everyone suffered.

The woman continued. “And do you think its coincidence that these books found their way into your hands? After all, Ramona, for all your reading you’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s been written.”

Ramona looked down at The Alcoholic’s Wife, still clenched in her hands. She couldn’t deny that for that one, she’d felt pulled. Guided. She had rarely taken her son to public places at that stage of his toddlerhood, as he was prone to tantrums. But this bookstore had a train table for kids, and he was obsessed with trains. And the only bookshelf she could peruse while keeping him in her line of vision just happened to be the memoirs, something she would normally have passed by. And The Alcoholic’s Wife just happened to be face out. And the moment of her life just happened to be the one where she was realizing Ricky wasn’t just a problem drinker.

The woman slid out of the chair and sat on the floor by Ramona. “It’s really very simple. There are Storytellers, and they’re very important. They write the words that others need: whether it be truth or fiction or something in between. They give hope, information, escape, wisdom, familiarity. Knowledge. They sate curiosity and for some people, tap into their dark side. They make people believe in love, or sometimes, in themselves.” Here, she tapped Ramona’s knee pointedly. “And sometimes it shines a light on things that we can’t quite see.”

Suddenly it was so clear to Ramona. She jumped up and ran to the shelves and just like magic, the book she wanted was in front of her.

“Yes!” she said excitedly. “This one!” It was a novel about a surgeon missing an important tumor on a scan, and the fall out of his life and the patient’s life when it was clear his mistake was a terminal one.

She showed the book to the woman, the innocent cover just a drawing of a hospital, something she’d picked up in her neighborhood’s free lending library out of boredom. How she hadn’t thought much about it except…her mother had been saying something was wrong, something didn’t feel right. All her scans were clear. Her bloodwork was fine. But she was just so…tired.

“After I read this, I said to my mom that she needed to find a second opinion. And she did, and it turned out she had cancer.” Ramona stopped, remembering that moment for a second, the hushed space in the room when her father seemed dumbfounded, and her mother said nothing.

“Well, she ultimately died. But she had a good five years because her diagnosis was early. And my father had kind of checked out by then, and they had these separate lives. And I hadn’t married Ricky yet, so my mom and I hung out a lot. We took road trips and got lunch and went to the beach and went shopping.” Ramona smiled nostalgically, remembering those years when the knowledge of her mother’s mortality had softened Ramona’s judgment of her. How much fun they’d had together.

“So, you’re the Storyteller, then?” Ramona returned to the floor and sat down…something about it felt organically right, the way children at library class might sit in a circle to hear a story being read.

“Oh, no,” the woman laughed. “No, no not me. But, you do know me.”

Ramona stared at her face, at her strong hands with bright red nails. She breathed in her scent of jasmine, also familiar and yet she was certain she’d never met this woman before. And this dream…well, this couldn’t be a dream. No dream was this detailed. So where was she?

As she stared at the woman, she felt as if they were inexplicably tied. She closed her eyes, and could see herself hunched over her laptop, writing out the articles that she submitted to psychology blogs and online journals. She thought about the book she’d been contemplating…inspired by Fifty Minutes, but instead of being written about the extremes in therapy, it would be on the things that nearly everyone had in common. Stress. Anxiety. Doubt. Fear. She wanted it to be something that gave people hope, that helped them realize that they were not alone.

“And you will,” the woman said, as if she were reading Ramona’s thoughts. Ramona, stunned, looked up and had a clear picture of the woman’s hands—which she’d just been studying so closely—guiding hers as she wrote. For a split second it all made sense and Ramona knew.

“You’re my muse?” she asked, but it didn’t need to be a question. She knew it as wholly as she knew her own name.

“Yes,” the woman said, standing and pulling Ramona up with her. “Everyone has jobs, you know. Some people realize it, and some don’t. But some,” (and here, she put her hand lovingly on Ramona’s cheek,) “some have such important jobs that they need a little extra help. Just to make sure things don’t knock them off track. Like bad husbands or self-pity. That’s where I come in.”

Ramona swallowed, embarrassed for some reason. Here, in this magical, dream-like, book-filled space, feeling badly about a broken marriage to someone like Ricky seemed pathetic.

“So, if I’m understanding…you’re my muse. And you help me write. Do you help me when I’m working, too? Like do you help me say the right things and pull out the right amount of compassion and keep myself professional with clients? Are you there when I’m mothering my son or trying to go on a date?” Ramona inwardly cringed, remembering last month’s awkward first (and last) date with a guy she’d met online. And simultaneously, recalled the book she’d read just last week: Confessions of a 40-Something Single Woman. A book which summed up and validated her very unimpressed feelings about dating.

“Oh my God, its true. These books come to me!”

The Muse threw her head back and laughed, remembering the date along with Ramona. “Well, I’m there for these things. But I have nothing to do with that stuff. That’s all you. I’m just…the ideas chick. For creativity.”

“What’s happening?” Ramona wondered. All around her, the scenery changed, became smudged and blurry, as if she was slightly drugged, although she felt clearer and more centered than ever.

The Muse took her hands, radiating with love.

“I guess it’s time for you to go,” the Muse said, sadly.

“So, it is a dream.” Even their voices sounded far away, echoey to Ramona. The only thing that felt tangible was the Muse’s hands holding hers.

“If you want it to be a dream, sure,” the Muse’s dark eyes twinkled. “I like to call it magic.”

Now, Ramona could no longer see the Muse, her shape becoming a shadow mixed with all the other colors, and Ramona could feel her own body becoming heavier, as if she were about to fall through the floor and wake up back in her real life.

“Wait!” she exclaimed, as the Muse’s hands got lighter and lighter. “What is my job?”

As Ramona’s eyes fluttered open, she took in the bright sunlight of her bedroom, the mounds of white down she was buried under. She struggled to remember the dream she’d just come out of. She hated when that happened—waking from an amazing dream that faded before she could even touch it. She closed her eyes and tried, wanting desperately to go back into whatever world she’d just woken up from.

But it was pointless; she was awake. All she remembered was a faint whisper of a woman’s voice, which was invoking a strange sense of déjà vu.

Ramona sighed and got up to make coffee, and her attention went to the orange cover of a book on her nightstand that a colleague had given her. It was entitled Write The Book, and it had been collecting dust for weeks. Ramona wasn’t really into how-to manuals, but for some reason, she felt compelled to pick it up today. As she tucked it under her arm, the faint whisper of the dream became actual words, words she remembered.

You’re the storyteller, the voice of a woman said.