Retro Tuesday 6-25-2019

June 6, 2016 by athling2001

FRIDAY FICTION with RONOVAN WRITES Prompt Challenge #28-A Dream

See more here.

Word Count is off! Let’s focus on the theme of the thing. Not many actually stick to the word count anyway. (SUGGESTED-No more than 500 if you want to try that.)

• Using the prompt of ‘A Dream’, WRITE. Is a dream something that happens while asleep or something you want really really bad?  Or is it something else entirely? (REQUIRED)

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The monster was eating him from the legs up, crunching flesh and bone and something inside that had no form. Every day, he woke as the sun broke over the trees, dream fading, dimmer and dimmer, until it was nothing more than a ghost inside his head.

In the daylight, he remembered the good things from his yesterdays: the number of words written, pages filled, the number of times, and there had been many, when his voices refused to do as he wanted. He wrote one thing, but when he returned, an hour or a day later, his words were gone, replaced by the voice’s stories.

Most times a better story than his.

Their stories gave him security in life, no need to worry about bills to be paid, groceries to be purchased, dinners and movies and dances to be missed. He didn’t remember the last time he had gone to a dinner or a movie or a dance. Most of the time he pushed those memories aside. Time enough for regret later.

He hadn’t been out of the house in three years. The days and weeks disappeared like his words, written and gone, while he tapped away, praying for one story of his own. He wasn’t selfish. He didn’t want to silence the voices. He wanted time to write the story of stories, pouring out heart and soul so perfectly he would never be forgotten.

His story.

He paced the floor, using up the days. A day. A week. A month. A year. Five years. Ten. Twenty. Fifty. Searching for that one story. None of them right. None of them perfect.

The monster ate him up one night deep in February, a thick blanket of snow silencing keys tapping out his screams.

 

Retro Tuesday 6-18-2019

June 7, 2015 by athling2001

Sleepless without Candles

I lie here wondering why, once again, I can’t sleep.  I go in endless concentric circles, forbidden sleep by some force within my own mind until I’m so exhausted, day after day,  I can’t stay awake and then, sleeping at the drop of a hat. Somehow, there must be a middle ground.  I used to live on the middle ground. Bed by 8 pm every night, up in the morning, and over the first few months my sleeping gradually reverted back to normal. All the sleep lost over the years made right.

Which lasted until about….towards the end of the marriage and the struggle afterwards. Back to square one.

But wait.  That’s not what this post is about, not really.  I’m pretending, hiding, avoiding the reality that thirty-five minutes ago the clock clicked to 12:01 am and now it is June 7th, my mother’s birthday.  The first birthday without her.  No searching for the perfect present or baking cakes, finding the sweet treats she liked the most.  My family is small. Celebrations are almost always meals, mostly at my parent’s house.

But there will be no meal this year.  No one will gather, bustling in with gift bags and coolers full of food. There will be no gathering around the kitchen for the blessing, no filling plates from the counter between the kitchen and dining room.  No bright paper. No candles.  No laughter.

Just tears.

All my life, I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be without her, trying in my childish and then less than childish way to prepare myself for the dreadful moment I knew would eventually arrive. But no amount of preparations, no years of illness or the knowledge of what was to come, could possibly have prepared me for the reality of her emptiness. It couldn’t prepare any of us.

No balloons.  No cards. Just sadness. Working later today.  Needing to come home and accomplish something, anything, to keep from wasting away the hours of the day, minutes ticking like raindrops on glass.  Each minute another tear. Each second another loss.  Each tick or tock the feeling of being utterly alone in the thick dark when most children cry for their mother. I can only cry after.  There is no more crying for her to come.

I would like to say there is a glaring riff in my soul, a chunk torn from my heart so large that it will never heal.  That would be poetically beautiful, show me as the brave heroine standing fast against the pain.  But I can’t.  I don’t have a riff, just the tick tock of minutes moving me further and further away from the woman who showed me, both by example and by my refusing her example, how to be the person I have become in a world in which she has finally, inevitably, left me behind.

Tick

Tock.

JSW Prompt 8-12-2019

 

Feel free to join in and respond to the prompt. Please try to keep your response between 200 – 250 word (recommended, not law). You can write a story, poem, essay, anything which strikes your fancy! Link your work back to this post so people can read it.

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Pinterst

Retro Tuesday 6-11-2019

Month: June 2014

“Men have no mo…

“Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me…”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

So said the fox.  The Little Prince did tame the fox and thus they were connected.  “…If you tame me, we shall need one another. To me, you will be unique. And I shall be unique to you…. My life will be filled with sunshine. I’ll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Others send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music,” said the fox.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

We have accomplished so much in this world – cars and planes and computers.  Skype.  Cell Phones.  Instant Messaging.  Each of these inventions have succeeded in shrinking our world into smaller and smaller and smaller bits – including the ‘spaces’ between us, our houses, our lives, our countries.  Yet the chasms that exist in this world yarn wider than ever before.  We’re too busy playing computer games, surfing Facebook,  Ebay or any other site that has drawn us in, ensnared us, that many of us have lost the sense of the world beyond it’s lit screen.  Is being ‘tamed’ by the internet really a connection?  How does this life make us unique to one another?

Instead of sitting on a hill with family or friends to watch a sunset, we look at a picture somebody posted on Facebook.  By ourselves.  Want new shoes?  Buy them online and avoid the crowds and hassle and the personal interaction with the sales people. Order groceries online?  You don’t have to even speak to anybody.  Want to see a movie?  No need to go to the theater.  Just order it online and watch it in the privacy of your own home.  Want a vacation?  Forget the rush of the sea or the cool of the mountains.  Plan a staycation instead and spend your time surfing, each member of the family cut off in their own space.

At what cost have we grown into this new world?  What small pleasures are hidden in the darkest shadows which we never now see and what is lost when our interactions scroll endless through pixels and numbers and cables across thousands of miles that make us feel so close when we’re really not.  No one, especially me, is insisting that the days before these inventions were the absolute ‘good old days,’ but perhaps we have lost something that shouldn’t have been allowed to vanish.

Said the Little Prince to the snake:

“No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

My wish is that someday we can all be ‘unique in all the world’ to each other.

Really? 6-6-2019

 

Images from Pinterest

Quote For The Day 6-6-2019

Quote For The Day 6-5-2019

“Eyes reveal the unsaid things.”
― Avijeet Das   

JSW Prompt 6-4-2019

Feel free to join in and respond to the prompt. Please try to keep your response between 200 – 250 word (recommended, not law). You can write a story, poem, essay, anything which strikes your fancy! Link your work back to this post so people can read it.

 

Pinterest

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Retro Tuesday 6-4-2019

June 9, 2014 by athling2001

Writing Challenge 101 Day 4 – The Serial Killer (Loss)

Everything I learned about being a mother I learned from my mother.  Simple, right?  Of course I learned from her.  But it’s not so simple as that.  I was the baby of the family, the introvert, the dreamer.  The nonconformist.  I lived inside my head, inside the stories I was always telling myself, understanding those stories and their characters better than I could ever understand the real world around me. My mother was just the opposite; she lived in the real world and had no use for the daydreams and fantasies of her youngest child.

I always thought this was the reason we so often clashed.  Now, however, I think we weren’t so different after all.  She had to live in a reality that I had not yet known.  She had a husband and kids and a house to run.  Groceries to buy, food to cook and endless cleaning of house and laundry.  When I grew up and had these same things come to me, I had to learn how to live outside my own reality.  There isn’t a choice when you have children.

I have come to understand that being a mother comes from the heart and from the soul.  It is the greatest surrender any woman can make to put aside her life for 18 + years to focus on her children.  Not all mothers make this sacrifice, but my mother did.  There are no absolutes in a mother’s world, no true rights or wrongs.  Everything we do as mothers is in the Now, the eternal present. There is no past or future in mothering. Every word we choose leaves it’s input on our child forever. As a mother myself, I can now see the challenges and sacrifices that she made from both sides.  She did the best she could in the Now.  When she knew better, she did better.  What better mantra for any mother?

Somewhere in the turmoil of our relationship,  the truth of being a mother changed.  Maybe she leaned that you can’t fix your children.  Maybe she finally saw me for who I was and not who she wanted me to be.  Or maybe she just learned how to stop being a mother and start being a friend.  Time and again, she stood behind me without questions, no longer trying to fix my life, but simply being there. She learned that I didn’t need somebody to fix my problems (though I may have wanted that),  but instead I needed somebody to hear me.  I needed to know that I had value as me and not just as the person others wanted me to be.  I needed somebody who would never leave.

But there is no permanency in motherhood. Eventually mothers go away from their children, leaving behind an empty space inside that will never again be filled in the same way.  Sometimes this leaving is first mental, just as you have gone away into a world of imagination where I cannot enter, our roles switched in what seems a tragic irony of fate.  Eventually, however, it will be forever. This, too, is motherhood.  A letting go, a final freedom, the ability of a child to physically let go of their mother when the time is right and the knowledge that, in truth, motherhood never ends.  It is an endlessness that has carried women from the first moment of the world, uniting us all back to the first mother, that very first instant when a woman looked upon her face of her newborn and fell in love.

What better tribute could there be?

Quote For The Day 6-4-2019

“Your life will change when you make an effort to make a change.”
― Charles E Hudson