story of your life

I love people.  That isn't entirely true, not even remotely true for the most part.  By and large I hate people, they are annoying and I don't have time for them.  I love some people.  A few people, but those few I love hard, and for the rest of their lives unless they break that love with repeated, unforgivable, horrendous actions.  Somewhere nestled between the ranks of the hated and thus completely  ignored, and the beloved are those who have somehow broken into my life but I don't know what to think of them yet.  I love their stories.  So, I suppose, when I say I love people what I really mean to say is that I love people's stories: the details of their lives, the quiet subtleties they think don't make a difference to the arc, the huge fireworks inducing spectacular moments.  Everybody has a story, and the more stories that I listen to the more I find that every story is the same story.  We humans are predictable.  We make the same choices for the same reasons and experience the same emotions to the same events in our life cycles.  But what keeps us from being boring uninteresting robots is the way that though the colors are the same they come in different hues for each of us, the shades are all unique, there are infinite variations on the theme of humanness and this thrills me.

I not only love stories, but I need them.  I Need them in the way that the word covet is defined by Merriam Webster:

1   : to wish for earnestly <covet an award>

2

:  to desire (what belongs to another) inordinately or culpably

intransitive verb

:  to feel inordinate desire for what belongs to another

I want the stories poured out of the soul of their possessors and to lock them away in a secret wardrobe in a chamber of my heart to keep and compare to others and sort and retell if only to myself.  I think that this is less of a Buffalo Bill style sign of serial killer-like psychosis and more of an indicator that I really want to use all of these stories to write my own story about the (wait for the cliche) human condition.

The need I have for other people's stories leads me to constantly ask questions.  "So what's your story?" is usually the entree that may seem like a polite casual inquiry bordering on small talk but will actually lead to an unending litany of questions that will eventually feel like they are designed to steal your soul and will only end if you insist.

Sometimes the questioning gives the wrong impression.  A person might think such pointed and persistent questioning is a sign that the one asking is interested in them, especially in a romantic way if we're talking about a guy, but it is just curiosity.  Curiosity killed the cat you know.  One might think it is rude or prying, but they have got me all wrong, I just love people...or their stories...or somehow a person's story makes me love them more? at all?  I find friendships and loves and and relationships of all kinds through their stories.  There is something about being given a free pass through a window of knowing the source of the exhilaration, ecstasy, jubilation, bliss, agony, anguish, defeat, depression, misery, contentment, amusement, anger in someone.  It binds you to them, ties you with the thread of commonality, so that we are all stitched together to some extent: more tightly to some and loosely to others, but inexorably tied through our stories.