How to be a narrator.
To be a narrator, you need discipline. Stand to the side, watch all the things you’ve been fed, dreamy and disbelieving, happening to the people around you, chased by them. Small calculations made in notebooks on the ways they flock and thread; long, dark summers of mistakes and here you are, learning tricks from stories, talking big, whole cornucopias of things you’ve never truly been, or truly done, folded easily into equations, battle motifs, ornery with unknowing. The best narrator doesn’t look like one. To get a story from the wilds, you paint yourself like the jungle and you roar. They look funny at the trees, the still things, the alive but silent things. They know what doesn’t move must only watch, and once they’re watched they won’t show you their hinges, their odd, broken fingers shoved in arrowhead wounds, all ribs equidistant and ready for cracking. You won’t find a way to understand why they love it, all this, all this, a lost rosetta, and then you have nothing.
Do not talk about wanting to be turned over, changed hands like a returned necklace, being an upheld law, some bed fitted length of you, no awful hallway lights under doors. Two eyes like headlights, dimmed by daylight, wary, medicinal. No windows high up off the ground, to have distance from it, to see no one outside of it, some ghost inside a draped mirror. No sea salt smell of blankness, whitewashed, beige, milky skin.
Do not talk about wanting to sleep for days in a locked room, eyes resting only on the white cornice horizon, full up like a cold kettle in an empty house.
