When my brother and I were young, we used to tell each other stories every night as we fell asleep.  I remember whispering for hours in the dark, Josh on the top of the bunk bed we shared, me staring up at the wooden slats of the bedframe above me, spinning worlds and adventures out of nothing.  It was my favorite part of the day.

When I was 6 or 7 years old, my parents moved us into separate rooms.  We had two younger sisters at the time, each of whom needed a bottom bunk for safety.  Josh and I ended up on the two top bunks, one in each room, with a shared wall between us.

My dad knew how important our stories were to us.  So he did something amazing, something I doubt any other dad has done.

He cut a hole in the shared wall between the two bedrooms and aligned the bunk beds on either side of it, so Josh and I could look through and talk to each other as we lay in bed.

He called the hole our “whisper window.”

That narrow opening in the wall became a passageway for the stories we told every night.  In some ways, it shaped my childhood.

I remember the smell of drywall and insulation as we pressed our faces close to the opening, feeling the slick cold of the PVC pipe my dad had used to line the inside.  A smooth, white tunnel.  I remember seeing Josh’s face smiling on the other end as we whispered and laughed late into the night.

The house has long since been remodeled and the wall torn down.  But the gift my dad gave to us remains.

The whisper window kept our stories alive.

And today, more than 20 years later, Whisper Window is my way of saying “The stories are still here.  I’m still here.  I’m alive.  And I have something to tell you, if you’ll come close to the passageway and listen…”

Isn’t that what stories are, after all, for each of us?

– Kyle Chezum