PURSUING THE INTIMATE STRANGER AND TRADING IN METAPHORS

Hmmm, is there a story behind each and every one of those glittering lights that illuminate the night skyline? Am I gazing upon a galaxy of dreams?

The view from my 18th floor window extends southward from Brampton toward Lake Ontario. On a clear night I can decipher the shape of the CN Tower. There are innumerable lights of various hues and shapes between me and that famous landmark. White pinwheels. Strings of amber pearls. Pulsing needle points of red.

I am inclined to believe that each of these lights shines for a heart that has its own story to tell. Stories of joy and of sorrow and of hope. Tales of wonder and of grief and of longing. All of them with a cherished dream welling up in the heart.

Too often we become so caught up in the drama of our own life that we become blind to what exists around us. I for one confess to that character flaw. At times I put an inordinate amount of energy into shoring up the castle walls of my comfort zone. I'm rather too adept at it for my own good sometimes.

But as a writer I am also drawn to look beyond myself for the stories that lie hidden waiting to be told. I am an observer of human life and an explorer of the secret code of behaviours and idiosyncracies that hint at dreams, desires and phantom hopes.

Every one of us has a face that we show to the world at large and another private one that we show only to our loved ones. But it doesn't end there. Deep down in our heart our hearts we each have an intimate stranger that seldom sees the light of day. An identity that we cannot fully comprehend but which is more deeply us than we care to admit.

It is this intimate stranger that the artist in me is inexorably drawn to explore. I catch quick, phantom glimpses of it when I am attuned to the unspoken. The frightened look that flits across the face of a passerby on the street. The flash of anger that erupts without warning. The pained expression of sympathy and the fleeting moment of elation. The eccentricity that no one can explain.

I trade in the unexplained and go questing to attach meaning to it. I venture into dark alleys of the soul where I am not always welcome. The writer in me is a miner of the psyche searching for rare gems that are not always precious.

It is entirely possible that the artist in me is one and the same as my own intimate stranger. Perhaps the more I write the more intimate we become and the more I understand myself.

Those countless glittering lights in the night sky are a metaphor for the stories I seek. Metaphors are in turn a tool I use to shed light on the intimate strangers I find.

I have no doubt that I too am a metaphor. But that is for someone else to explore.

~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of "Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel" – double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael's website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog.

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