Back Pocket Tales

Have you ever met a person that people told you many horror stories about just to meet them and experience a totally different person? 

I have met many people in my life that others have warned about. They tell their cautionary tales of why they don’t trust that person and share details of their relationship and history. 

In some situations, I meet them and get a brief insight to what the other individual has shared about them and other times I don’t see what has been shared at all. 

I always find these situations to be interesting because I don’t want to disregard the perspective that has been shared with me but I also want the person that I am meeting to be able to share themselves with me without putting a wall up and expecting them to behave to my expectations.

It feels unfair to go in with expectations and, if you unintentionally impose those expectations, human nature directs them to live up to what I impose on them. 

So, I kindly tuck away the cautionary tales to my back pocket. Aware of what I may be walking into but not projecting those expectations onto the person. 

I want to experience them myself and to form my own thoughts and ideas based on our cumulative interactions. 

 More often than not, I am pleasantly surprised by the person. 

By going in aware of how they may behave, I’m alert to their behaviors that may confirm the tales in my pocket but rarely do I pull those tales out in the first few meetings. 

What’s even more interesting is I rarely share those outside perspectives with the individual that I am meeting as I don’t want to taint their relationship with the other person (more than it already is) — it just doesn’t feel like my place— but I ultimately hear their side of the tale. 

Sometimes the puzzle comes together entirely, sometimes I am left with strongly differing perspectives and no clear answer as to who the “bad guy” is. 

As I write this out I realize that I can thank my parents for this cautious skepticism when hearing feedback on others. 

I love both of my parents but they were, at times, a pain in my ass and the weekly switch between homes could be a lot. 

There were occasionally debriefs of what took place at my other home. 

There were also interesting insights into the past relationship of my parents. 

Sometimes, I couldn’t parse the shit talking from helpful information so I would mostly disregard information. Putting it in my back pocket until I would receive some sort of confirmation of it. 

I can’t think of any prime examples of what hasn’t been confirmed—I have deep back pockets and tales get lost in there sometimes until resurfaced by one of the parties—but I can think of a handful of time where stories became believable as both parties mutually confirmed the information without any direction from me. 

This was always shocking to me when it happened. Mostly because it was a rare occurrence but at other times because somehow these conversations would randomly pop up with absolutely no prompting from me on either side. 

There are two of these stories that are very interesting to me. 

The first, when my parents were still together. 

We took a family trip to Scotland to visit the hotel, The Inchnacardoch, that my grandparents owned at the time.

As I was but a wee lad, I don’t remember anything but my foot falling through a dock into the loch and thinking Nessie was going to viciously rip my leg off and eat me… I had an… active imagination, okay? And my dad nearly pissing himself laughing while pulling me out of said hole in the dock—there is a story that has been told for years since, almost identically between my mom and my dad. 

It is that while we were all sleeping in our hotel room, my mom and dad woke up to my sister standing by her bed. They both told Kelsie to go back to bed and she was seemingly ignoring them. They proceeded to look in the bed and Kelsie was there, sleeping blissfully. When they looked back to where Kelsie had been standing, there was nothing. 

The hotel was notoriously haunted and while we have shared ghost stories at various times in my life, I slept through this whole experience. 

But the story stands to this day with little give between my mom and dad. 

The other story, in a very similar vein, was once again absent yours truly. Who even is the main character in these stories? 

As told by both of my parents to me on separate occasions, again, unprovoked, they had been driving with my sister in the car when they felt the overwhelming presence of my Aunt in the car with them. 

Shortly after, they would find out that she had committed suicide. 

That is a very abridged version of the story as it is not my story to misstell and I don’t want my mind filling in unnecessary blanks but that was a second experience that they separately shared with me on different occasions in which I knew my parents had a shared experience. 

If I had heard it from one, it was their perspective and put in my back pocket. If the story had wild differences, both were put in the back pocket and I would more than likely disregard both perspectives or at the very least not read into one more than the other. 

But in situations like both of the above, it acted as an immediate confirmation that the tale was mutually verifiable and thus, more likely to be true.