Remember to float occasionally.

Float between the stories that connect us.

Like beads on a necklace, links on the chain, this paver to that, one foot catching up to the other.

The stories. They breathe life into a life, any life, my life, your life, his life.

When the person dies, the stories die with him.

Gone from the concavity of an empty chest, into the ground, into the air, into decay and rebirth.

The immigrant trunk across an ocean. The bentwood cedar box full of experiences, the first time ascending a mountain, sounds, a string quartet and the living whisper of a breeze, sights, the way the light hit a pond on a waning October evening, boding the longest night would be here soon. The snippet of conversations, the humdrum and every day occurrences in the churn of the living. The recreation of a family tree, a mental map of who is who in this world – you know her, she was married to so and so. So and so was her aunt. They lived on S. Hibbard street. Ah right, right before they moved away.

They say we have blood memory. Our epigenetics speaking, tapping out a Morse code, transmitting the truth. If we’re quiet enough to listen to it.

Well, I’m quiet. I’m waiting. And I wait for it to come – a flash back and a flash forward and all the sudden I’m floating again, grasping for the thread of the story, of the tapestry, to finally discover which patch do I belong to, what stories are mine now, not to be kept, to be shared, for now and for when I too am gone.