I Have So Much Stories to Tell
They say a jester belongs to a court.
This one belonged to the world.
His boots were worn thin, patched with colors stolen from banners of cities long conquered. His cap jingled with bells that had once amused queens, startled dogs, and frightened crows. But what truly gave him away was not his costume — it was the way he carried silence before every story, as if the air itself leaned in to listen.
No one ever asked for his true name. Names had weight, and he had traded his long ago for the freedom to walk wherever the wind blew.
In the salt-crusted taverns by the sea, where pirates drank with their boots still wet from pillage, he clambered onto a barrel and spun a yarn of a ghost ship crewed by drowned men who played dice with their own bones. The pirates laughed, but when the tide moaned against the docks that night, more than one hard-hearted marauder found himself shivering under his blanket, dreaming of skeletal hands reaching from the waves.
In palaces of polished gold, he bowed so low his bells kissed the marble floor. To kings, he told of humble shepherds who ruled fairer than monarchs. To dukes fattened with greed, he spun fables of rulers who starved in their feasts. The court roared with laughter, missing the mockery in his words. Yet the servants behind the columns pressed their lips together to hide their knowing smiles.
By day, he wandered through muddy fields, sharing tales with peasants whose hands were cracked from the plow. He told them the stars were lanterns carried by their ancestors, guiding their furrows straight and true. A child once tugged on his sleeve and asked:
“Do you believe what you say?”
The jester only winked.
“Belief is not my trade. I sell wonder.”
Among mercenaries with scarred faces, he conjured sagas of swordsmen who fought not for coin, but for names carved forever into memory. Some scoffed at such nonsense. Others stared into the fire, quiet, imagining their names written on lips not yet born.
With knights polished in pride, he whispered riddles of dragons slain by mercy, not steel. Their laughter clanked in their armor — but a few, secretly, could not stop turning the idea over like a blade in the dark.
In cloisters where prayers hummed like bees, he dared to tell of angels who tumbled from heaven in pursuit of mortal love. The nuns crossed themselves twice that night, their psalms longer, their voices trembling with questions they dared not name.
And sometimes, when no man or woman would hear him, he played his lute for animals of the wild — a fox crouched in the bramble, a stag frozen in shadow, a crow tilting its clever head. They offered no applause, but they listened all the same, which was more courtesy than many men gave.
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He carried more than laughter with him. A merchant’s clever lie became the seed of a new parable. A beggar’s curse twisted into the bones of a tragedy. A widow’s lullaby hummed its way into a comedy’s refrain. His patchwork cloak grew heavy with invisible treasures: voices borrowed, dreams stolen, fragments of lives he had passed like stepping stones.
One night, on a lonely road lit by nothing but a bleeding moon, a traveler asked him:
“You’ve wandered the breadth of the world, fool. Do you never tire of telling stories?”
The jester chuckled, and the bells on his cap chimed like tiny silver coins.
“Tire? The world invents faster than I can recite. Every dawn, it presses another tale into my hands — sometimes bloody, sometimes tender, always alive. I have so much stories to tell: for pirates and kings, for peasants and crows, for children not yet born. Enough even for you, if you’ll sit and listen.”
And before the traveler could reply, the jester began weaving the stranger into a story already halfway written, for that was his greatest trick of all:
No one ever left his company without becoming part of the tale.
He was the man who never stopped moving — the jangle of his bells heard on docks, in palaces, on dusty roads. He never lacked an audience.
Everywhere he went, he gave pieces of himself away.
The jester had no home.
He was a man who belonged everywhere, and thus belonged nowhere. Every tale he told was stitched from the lives of others — a merchant’s lie, a beggar’s curse, a widow’s lullaby. He carried their voices in his patchwork cloak, but when the cloak fell silent, he had no voice of his own.
Fulfillment was always a fingertip away. The laughter of strangers warmed him, but never long enough. The smiles of children lit him, but never stayed. He was a lantern fueled by other people’s wonder — burning bright while the crowd looked on, extinguished the moment they turned away.
“I exist only when the tale is alive. When the last word fades, so do I.”
A patchwork man, a bundle of borrowed voices stitched together with string. After each performance, when the fire burned low, when the tavern emptied, when the halls grew silent… he was always left with himself.
I’m welcomed everywhere, but claimed by no one. And every time I leave, I tell myself it’s choice. That I prefer the road. That I belong to the world. But sometimes, when the night is long and the stars burn too bright, I realize the road is the only place left for those who belong nowhere at all.
I tell stories because silence terrifies me.
I tell stories because if I don’t, I might remember how empty I truly am.
I have so much stories to tell.
But at the end of every road, every tale, every night…
there is no one left to tell them to.
