This Is the Story of You by Beth Kephart

Sometimes when I’m walking with my phone stuffed in my pocket, I do some serious thinking about my absence of intrigue. Oh my God, am I reading some book. But my quiet life resists every punctuation mark except, perhaps, the comma. Should I practice exclamations and declarations, bang a pair of metaphorical drums? Should I slap an exclamation mark at the end of every spoken sentence, change my pitch, my tone? Should I propel myself to a cinematic start: You won’t believe the silk that spun out of that spider. Whose tide have I turned? Whose pulse have I sparked? How are you? There should be a primer.

The thing is: What will leave the person on the other side of the phone begging and pleading for more? Does the trick of the talk live in the discovery I made (only today!) that the paints in my paint jars are moldy? Or in the fact that I haven’t properly vacationed for years, and so I read my way into adventure? Or in the very cherished secret that I sometimes sit in my battered leather chaise watching stubborn spiders spin? (Sometimes my husband exceeds the five-minute mark. Win every time the question is asked: How, how, how are you? Tell a good tale in five minutes or less.

It’s code for what he believes would cure me of my troubles. But even the finch hops away in a flash, arrogant as hell in its pretty yellow feathers.įive-minute rule, my husband says, when I return from my travels and sit in the drip of my sprawl and report on my latest conversational crash. Sometimes, when I’m at the proximate end of my travels and my face is berry red and my hair is whipped into its high humidity frenzy, the gold finch pecking on the crust of the cone flower that I am just then passing will hear me blunder with a short-changed tale, a wedged assertion, a strike of personal news. Uh, I stutter, and in the absence of my response, the talk salts up without me, which is to say that I can walk four hills, two cul de sacs, five point two miles, and 12,433 steps, a phone pressed to my ear, without making any sound except for the huff and the puff demanded by my exertions, and the yes, and oh my god, and so happy for you required of a listener. I am so notoriously arrantly perfectly foul at performing this simple civic duty that I become invisible to myself whenever I am asked. If there were a Very Special Prize for the world’s most inadequate respondent to the How are you? question, I would be blue ribboned.

This Is the Story of You by Beth Kephart