Now that I have some extra free time, I’m getting back into art and into my writing. I’ve been working on a short story that incorporates the thoughts and feelings I had when my sister died. We were very close, only 13 months apart, and even though we fought over everything, we had a shared history that no one in this world shares with me. We shared the same upbringing and experiences, moving with my family from California to Hawaii, back to California, to Japan, back to California, to south Texas, and then back again finally to California. We were both military brats growing up on Marine bases, so we quickly learned how to be flexible and to adapt to anything, something that has certainly come in handy at this particular point in my life.
Social media is a blessing and a curse. I’m happy that she was on Facebook before she left us, but sometimes, it’s like tripping over a rock and falling into an endless hole when I happen upon one of her instant messages from 11 years ago. I can’t believe it’s been almost 12 years since I lost her. I still think about her every day, and reading through her messages, I can still hear her voice and the laughter that was always clinging to the edge of her words.
So, the short story. I had set it aside for a bit, but I’ve picked it up again and have gone through a pretty large edit. I realized that I’ve skipped back and forth with my tenses, so after cleaning that up, I’ll have to set it aside and come back to it. I also saw that the seasons had suddenly switched mid page, so I’ll need to fix that as well. It’s fun though, and I have a rough outline of the short events that happen in it, but I’m not really sure the structure is super clear. It was cathartic to write, though, and maybe someday, when it’s closer to what I had originally envisioned, I’ll think about submitting it somewhere. In the meantime, writing it has been wonderfully therapeutic.
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