I believe in stories.

I believe that silence is made to be shattered and words are made to be strung together and voices are meant to be heard.

And stories are meant to be told. Stories like 10th St., Milwaukee. Stories like Hadiya Pendleton’s. Stories like Hunt’s Point, New York.

It gets cold in late December, and the line leading up to the meal center door is so long that it stretches into the street. It is so cold that I don’t really know how to describe it. It is as frigid as the heart of an NYPD officer, and that’s about as freezing as it gets. And I am walking past this line of people in my down jacket and I don’t want to look them in the eye, I don’t want to acknowledge that I’m here, I don’t want to pretend that I have the guts to just…stare. Because I don’t. Maybe it’s my jacket. Maybe it’s my shoes. But I always feel out of place. I always feel too privileged. And most of the time I feel ashamed that I have so much and they don’t. And every pair of eyes that I do meet, well, there’s a story there, and it scares me that there is so much in this world that I don’t know and may never know.

And if we think about it, how many stories have we already missed?

But it’s never too late to start.

Have you heard of Hadiya?

She is fifteen with these huge brown eyes and a smile that will make your heart melt, and she is also dead. Dead from bullet wounds she got for sitting in a public park after January final exams. I never knew her, but I miss her.

We never knew her, but we do now.

I believe in stories, in ugly truth and raw words and unkempt letters. I believe in the women who work the streets in the dim light of passing cars and the dirty clutches of money. I believe in the addiction that slips through battered veins, the hopelessness that lays claim to the spirit that has been chained down by lifetimes of oppression. And this is her fifth relapse and she’s homeless under the bridge again and her eyes are telling a story that we wish had never happened, but it did.

I believe in stories.

I believe that the only way to understand each other—the only way to understand this convoluted world—is through stories.

And with every story we hear, we must tell our own.