I Live My Life In Stories

I Live My Life in Stories

An Introduction

Some people seem to experience life as a series of things that happened. A conversation. A drive home. A morning in court. A strange interaction in a grocery store. Each moment begins, ends and is replaced by the next one. My mind has never worked that way.

I live my life in stories. I do not mean that I invent them, embellish them or necessarily tell them to anyone else. I mean that ordinary life rarely arrives in my mind as a collection of separate facts. It arrives with characters, settings, tension, timing and details that seem insignificant until they suddenly connect. A courthouse hallway becomes a scene. A sentence said in passing becomes the line that explains everything. Something I notice on Tuesday returns on Friday and gives the earlier moment an entirely different meaning.

Sometimes the story belongs to me. Sometimes I am only standing close enough to watch it unfold. Some stories develop over weeks, while others exist entirely within six minutes in a parking lot. They may be serious, funny, painful, absurd or unfinished. They will not always contain a lesson, and they will not always arrive at a satisfying ending.

This series is where I will write down some of the stories my mind finds in courtrooms, offices, kitchens, waiting rooms, conversations, headlines and the ordinary spaces between them. The events are real. The people are human. The perspective is simply mine.

I do not merely move through life and record what happened. I watch the pieces find one another, and somewhere along the way, they become a story.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm