GEODE

My day job is as a journalist, and while I find a lot of the posturing that journalists do about our role as storytellers to be pretentious and often egotistical, I also can't deny that I got into this because I love to see into people's lives. Why do people do what they do? Why do we make the choices we make? How did we get here, as individuals and as a collective?

Much of journalism is about the big moments — wars and chaos and game changing plays. But those don't come out of nowhere. They come from a history, both personal and communal. We are products of our childhoods, our cultures, our teachers, our parents. We come from places that have smells and sounds and textures. And we document those things — and here I don't mean "we" journalists, I mean "we" as people. Humans have, for our entire history, recorded ourselves in one way or another. We write on walls, we tell each other stories, we come up with words that have deep meanings that stretch back into time.

Some journalists see their job as speaking truth to power. Or telling the important stories in the face of chaos and misinformation. Or staking a claim to truth, and defending it. All of that is true, of course. But when I think about my job I don't think about those things. I think about excavation. About telling the story in such a way that you can feel the texture of the people in it. I think of stories like geodes.

Do you know how a geode forms? They start with a volcanic eruption. Lava flows from a hot, angry vent, and mixes with the gases in the air. Most of the time, those gases don't stay put — they escape into the air and go off to become the wind in your hair, or carry pollen, or sweep under a bird's wing. But sometimes, bubbles of gas can't escape the boiling weight of the lava and become trapped. As the lava cools, those bubbles remain. It is only then — held tight and encased in cooling rock — that the crystals characteristic of geodes form.

There is something sad about opening a geode. It can reveal a great beauty, but it is also inherently destructive. You are taking a hammer to something hard and protected and asking it to open, to be seen, to be commented on. Not all geodes want to open. Not all geodes should be opened, perhaps. Not all geodes are beautiful inside. How do you know when to break one, and when to leave it be?

Once you break a geode, you open the crystals up to damage. UV light can bleach the colors inside and the oils on your skin can slowly eat away at the glittering growths.

I think a lot, as a journalist, about the stories that we lose when people die. The small things that they knew — the color of a lover's hair, the name of their neighborhood dog, the true identity of a soldier — that go to the ground with them. I have to stop myself from buying home movies when I see them at garage sales and thrift shops — each one, to me, a geode. Inside they might contain nothing, or everything. Wrapped tight in metallic film they recorded things people thought were important, things people wanted to remember. Trapped in plastic and now, broken open.

This is a VHS geode. I have broken it, and it is unspooling, and we are forgetting. It is beautiful and terrible all at once.