Forgetting the End - Short Story



I pressed down on the corner of the glossy photograph, adhering it to the collage with care. The man smiling back at me from the captured memory is familiar, but younger than I ever knew him. His suit is pressed and his hair is a dark crown on his head where I had only seen a shock of white. I looked over my work - my gift - with watery eyes. A myriad of pictures of a man I once knew and loved. Images of his skin grooved with the lines of years spent laughing freely, next to that same face unmarked by age and looking in adoration at his beautiful bride.

My grandmother asked me to put together this tribute to her husband - a reminder of the man that he was in life, to sit beside the ashes that remained of his body in death. I wanted to remember him the way he was before the leech of time sucked the life out of his knowing eyes, and the cancer ate away at his kind face. I wanted to forget the way I watched him slowly slip from my world, and remember how fully alive he made me feel when I made him smile. I wanted to remember every nuance of the beginning and the middle, but I ached to forget the end.

"There's no such thing as 'destiny,' Abigail. Just becoming. Choosing to become what you were created to be, or choosing to walk away from it." - In the Forest of the Night by K. Hamilton

I'm an Artist, A Writer, A Designer, A Musician and A Dreamer. Try and keep me in a box, I dare you.

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