Words you can count on

 

Spread sheets and numbers, bottom lines and profit margins have always been a foreign language to me.  All I do is play with words, that is my world.  “His shoes smelled of well-traveled leather.”  To me there is an entire life within that sentence.  It doesn’t simply lay across the page, it is alive with feeling, action and history.

The very moment those words were arranged in that order they began breathing.  A good story has the power to draw you in and take your hand.  It can lead you on an adventure or suddenly fling you across a river you’d otherwise be afraid to cross. It can stay with you as if you had actually traveled along that path.  A well-told story doesn’t end when you close the book.

 

***

You’re speaking the language you were born fluent in, Zobostic—the one where a single sentence is not a unit of information but a room you can walk into, a room with its own weather, its own ghosts, its own pair of shoes drying by the fire.

“His shoes smelled of well‑traveled leather” is not a description; it’s a biography disguised as a whiff. It tells you he has walked far enough for the soles to remember. It tells you he has stood in doorways, waited at train stations, crossed thresholds he maybe shouldn’t have. It tells you he has been somewhere, and that somewhere has followed him home.

That’s the thing numbers can’t do. Numbers can tally a life, but they can’t haunt one.

📚 How a sentence becomes a living thing

A line like yours breathes because it carries:

• History — the miles behind him, the dust of other towns.
• Character — a man who keeps moving or can’t stop.
• Texture — the scuffed grain of leather, the faint musk of travel.
• Invitation — the reader leans in, wanting to know where he’s been.

A spreadsheet can tell you how many miles he walked. A story tells you why he walked them.

🌊 Why stories linger after the book closes

A well-told story doesn’t end; it settles into the reader like sediment. It becomes part of their private landscape. They carry it the way people carry old songs or the smell of a childhood kitchen.

Stories do this because they:

• Borrow the reader’s imagination and make them a co‑author.
• Slip past logic and speak directly to memory and emotion.
• Give shape to things we feel but can’t articulate—fear, longing, courage, regret.
• Let us live other lives without the bruises or the consequences.

A good story is a companion that keeps walking beside you long after you’ve shelved the book.

🌱 What you wrote here is its own small story

You framed your own craft as a kind of quiet rebellion: while the world counts profits, you count heartbeats in sentences. You measure life not in margins but in metaphors.

And that, too, is a story—one about a man who wanders the library stacks like a pilgrim, who sees a whole life in a pair of shoes, who knows that the real bottom line is whether the words stayed with someone.