Every day of the year, I'll be writing a short story, a poem, or even a reflection over my own life. It's a wild and crazy journey. I like to experiment with different styles and different ideas. Ever since starting to do this at the first of the ye...
270. Map it Out: Create a mind map of words, phrases, and ideas that pop into your head or spend some time browsing the many mind maps online. Write a poem, story, or journal entry inspired by the mind map.
What did I just create...?
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It’s different than he remembered it: decrepit now, flaky with rust and with air that swallows his lungs up. He had already done a cursory exploration of the old place, revulsion sickening in him at the disrepair. Now he had dropped into the corner, leaning his head back, staring at the peppered ceiling, and surrounded by memories that should have decayed with this place. Instead, they strengthened through the years.
He still couldn't believe that he was invited to her funeral. He couldn't believe he went.
What's life without a little self-inflicted emotional torture? As if to answer his own question, he raised one shoulder in a half-shrug: Who knew?
The ground is ashy and mixed with dirt and something else that feels unclean to even look at. He shouldn't be here. With the way the building groaned against the pushing wind and the deep cracks in the plastered walls, there was no guarantee this structure wouldn't collapse on him.
Still he remained, listening to the exicted wind and thinking of everything he had done in his life. It wasn’t hard once he realized just how little he had done.
He had a career. He had a few friends. He liked to barbecue and watch football and remember how much he had once meant to Lydia Louise.
Lydia Louise who he had kissed goodbye today.
What had he done with his life?
He couldn't even separate one remarkable day from another. They were all equally unremarkable, blending into each other until they were all the same, blinding him from beauty and originality like a dust storm. He felt himself symbolically stumbling through that storm, choking on the particles of raging sand and slipping on an unstable and forever changing ground.
Lydia Louise would be disappointed in me, he thought.
He looked around at the warehouse, where he and she used to play while their fathers supervised the workers, and for a moment he didn't see the painful representation of human abandonment. He could have looked at himself to see that. No, instead he glimpsed a past he treasured, with him and her innocently being everything to each other. Like children they loved each other, and like too many adults, they poisoned that love because it seemed like the sort of thing they should do.
But they were too fragile to recover from the first sickness.
He looked at his life. 40 years. How long it looked when he was a child, and how long it still looked now.
*
I really like the idea of someone turning their life around after it seems like too late. I like recovery stories.
