Love #2: Telling stories to the person you love


 

Remember when your dad or mum would start telling you a story?

"Once Upon A Time..."

or "There was an old man..."

or "One day, in a deep forest, far far away..."

or "Touch the spinning thread of destiny..."


It does not matter how they started the story, we would sit and listen to them. 

The stories did not need to have a moral, or a purpose, or a plot. They were about heroes or villans, about humans or animals, about life or death. Some were serious, some sad, some silly.

When we grew up, we stopped listening and started to read for ourselves. Sometimes, that voice in our head, the one that does the reading, would still speak in the voice of our parents or brothers or sisters. Someone we trusted to be in our head. But all things change. Eventually, the voice became many voices, the voice of an actor, of a friend, of a newsreader or, perhaps, just our own. 

Today, reading is second nature. We scan the words so quickly, we do not hear that voice reading the words. Alone in the words, we have no one to wiegh them, no one to offer a smile when one is needed, no one to explain something hard with the twinkle of an eye or the touch of a hand. We lose that voice in the forest of the words, a world grown old and less secure.

There is a cure. Surprise your lover with a smile and do not let them escape. Take a book or an article or a small piece of writing, and start to read it to them. 

Taste each word. 

Watch their eyes. 

Talk about it. 

Let the magic back into your worlds.


Copyright Dark Aelf, 2021 

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Comments

Anonymous said…
That's exactly how I imagined it would be
Peter Quinton said…
Dear Anonymous (imagined)
Listening to the melody of another's voice, changes the act of reading from one of simple consumption to engagement. I cannot remember the act of reading any particular page, but i can remember every moment of a page being read to me.
Cheers, Peter

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