Hello 🙂 It seems indulgent to, but I’m adding a smiley right off the bat in this post because I’ve written another one-pager before March ends, thus preserving my once-a-month streak…for now. 🙂 (Thanks for indulging me that second smiley!)
This one ended up being a sad one as well; perhaps I’m a glutton for this kind of emotional pain? Kidding, half. I’m quite happy about this one-pager honestly. It’s been one of my most cathartic ones, and I’ll keep my preface brief today by saying it’s grounded in the very real experience of losing my father before I felt like I was a complete person. Consequently in the years since, it’s been a lot of reaching backwards for memories, much as I always try to live my life moving forward.
For ambience:
The words:
Prompt: I looked up at the night sky and thought of the stories he used to tell about the stars, the constellations, and it seemed sad that I couldn’t remember a single one of them. There’s a string of stars called Orion’s Belt, and I think Orion is known as a hunter, but I’m not sure of what. It’s funny to think that, because in a way I’m a hunter, too, only I hunt…
My response: …for memories of him. In some ways, it isn’t hard to because we have several shelves in the gameroom full of photobooks my dad stuffed with important and not-so-important records of our time as a complete family. I prodded at him as a kid, trying to find out why he insisted on including the photos that didn’t make sense to me to include: ones in which my chin was tilted so I had chins, ones where the sun’s glare had caused overexposure, ones where my mom’s hand stuck out, because she wasn’t ready. “These are also important to remember,” my dad had said. “And besides, we have plenty of room in the books to fill.” And so, it’s those “in-between” pictures that make the memory-hunting hard again. They remind me that every moment then, we were living and creating home in our minds. When the photos aren’t enough to sustain me and soothe the ache of knowing home is a place i have to recreate without my dad, I try our home videos, or more like the ones he taped. When those fail, I lie down, close my eyes, and have to do the devastating work of waiting patiently and actually making my mark: hitting upon a moment I’d thought I’d lost forever and will stay lost to a home of the past, once I open my eyes again.
Also published on Medium.