Three Graces

I sat in my office and listened as a young woman told me a story.  As she spoke, her husband sat next to her chuckling.  She had arrived at a new house her family had just purchased when she was very young and recognized the house as a place she had lived before with her dog, "puppy".  This of course was impossible, as her family had never before lived in the house, and she had never had a dog.  It turned out that the family who had originally lived in the house had a daughter who had fallen into a well and died when she was four, exactly a year before the young woman was born, and had a dog named "puppy".  Though the event had occurred over twenty years ago, she was clearly still moved by it.  After she finished, her husband told her that the story did not address the point of my question, and her exact response was, "It's a good story, douche."

She told a second story.  He sat and chuckled as she relayed her horror of watching her father's skin burn off of his body after he had thoughtlessly unscrewed the radiator cap immediately after having driven his car.   Again came the inevitable, "douche."

And then, finally, a third.  As a teenager, she had been a life guard at a theme park and somehow the management had gotten a hold of a tape of a real life drowning and decided to show it to the lifeguard trainees in order to motivate them to take the job seriously.  Part of the motivation was telling them to imagine the individual who had drowned as a relative.  This had clearly be traumatic for her, but again, did not seem to satisfy her husband's idea of what my question was addressing.

After she had finished, I asked her husband if he wanted to take a ball in exchange for a story.  He replied that he did not.

When I set out to do this project, I had very specific, some might even say rigid, goals in mind, and I too might have thought that these stories were not fear/desire applicable.  But in this interaction I witnessed a woman intent on telling her story, even as her husband sat and laughed, maybe even knowing he would laugh, but being brave enough to reveal herself anyway.  I then witnessed her husband's fear of telling the story he might want to share but could not bring himself to tell.

Maybe it comes down to what we have the courage to reveal about ourselves, who we are able to be in front of the people we love, and whether or not we choose to contort ourselves in order to be comfortable with the skin we wear in the world.