I think I've just buried my father, and he's not exactly dead just yet. This summer I thought up a whimsical little piece of fluff about a little girl who lives next to the city cemetery. A few days ago I decided to use that idea for my second story in my fiction writing class. But I couldn't make it work, nothing that I thought of to happen to this little girl was worth writing about. Then I hit on a young woman who comes into the cemetery looking for a grave so she can change out the flowers like a dutiful daughter and go away, but she has no idea where the grave it. Enter the little girl, who decides to help her.
About halfway through the story it became quite clear to me that this was no longer the little girl's story. The woman had taken over, with her crushing guilt over leaving home and abandoning the life her father had given her, and the failure she felt she had always been as a daughter. I barely bothered changing the names, it was like channeling the transcript of a conversation I'm likely to have with a strange cemetery urchin a few years from now. It felt good, though, something I suppose I needed to deal with so that now I can hopefully be more aware of the relationship I have with my dad, because let's face it, with his health and work schedule it's not like I've got a hell of a lot of time to make things right again.
It's not amazing, but it is one of the better things I've written since I got all blocked about my writing a couple years ago. It's just a complete shame I can never show it to my family. "Hey dad, I got a great review on this story." "Oh yeah, what's it about?" "Nothing much, I just killed you off and used your grave as the setting for my own self-realizations." "That's nice, Amy, since you're here could you help me with these portrait orders, I've got three more weddings to edit and I have to be back at the paper at 8 in the morning." Who wants to come out with a revelation like this one and have it completely ignored?
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