A Hope and Dreams

Whenever I sit on mother’s porch, I think of your ghost. Your shadow sits beside mine, as the stars race by. Our hands reach over the rotten wood between us, sweaty summer palms clutched together.

My father and I only speak at sunset, and although his eyes are drawn to the models in his hands, I know his attention is solely on me. Every day, he asks me if I have anything I want to tell him, as if expecting some cloying emotional anecdote to immediately flow forth. I try to force the words forward, my eyes locked on the back of his head, mouth forming soundless syllables. When the sun finally dips beneath the horizon, he turns to me, with nothing but a smile to offer, and I am content to give him the same.

Every afternoon, I find myself drawn from my storybooks by the exuberant cries of the long-haired child across the street. Every day, the child plays the same games, wind whipping their hair into their face, forcing them to spit it out between laps of the turf yard, stray strands only temporarily muffling their joyful screams. The noise is sometimes overwhelming, to the point that I consider walking out to confront the child myself, finally putting a face to the inarticulate yells that haunt my afternoon. But my hair chokes the words before they can escape from my mouth, and instead I listen to the child call out for the both of us.

Obituary of John J. Johnson, Draft 1 Some time late last night, between the hours of 11 pm and 3 am, entrepreneur John J. Johnson passed away, at the age of 69. Mr. Johnson was best known for his generous financial contributions to the biology departments of the majority of middle and high schools in the county. However, while Mr. Johnson was highly philanthropic during the early part of his life, his donations dwindled over the years, in favor of amassing a large collection of modern art which now decorates the extravagant family home. This transition roughly aligns with his controversial marriage to well known political activist Minerva Johnson née von Vaughan, after breaking off a very public engagement to a fellow member of the idle elite. It is not known what will happen to Mr. Johnson’s vast collection of modern sculpture and paintings, or the Johnson family estate, which is situated just outside of town. Mr. Johnson never made any details of his will public, and so how these phy...

Unsure of what may lay ahead, she moves forward. As a different person than her childhood peer expected her to become, in a hometown that has grown with her —yet she can barely see the changes for the nostalgia that blankets it—she moves forward. She grasps for the aspects of herself that she has set in stone, has decided must stay the same even when the foundations rock around her, using them as a guide rail as she moves forward. Even when she cannot stop herself from glancing back, from remembering and missing the things that she has left behind, she moves forward. As she lays in bed, worrying over nothing but future what ifs, past events that won’t leave her cycling through her mind. As she lays there, unable to stabilize her breathing, to get a wink of sleep, she moves forward in her imagined dreams.

She’s an atheist who thinks she’s agnostic, or an agnostic who wishes she were an atheist, depending on the day. The days that she thinks she can hope that there might be something, but she just needs proof, she simultaneously wishes for the simplicity of simply deciding that there’s nothing to be found. But the days that she almost knows that there’s nothing there at all, she thinks that maybe, just maybe, she believes in something more, if it was presented to her, if only to give her the hint of something beyond nothingness.  She'll never realize her own contradictions.

The halation of the image fading away from brightness at the end. Or maybe the brightness just fades in our eyes What would we think, if the excitement we felt back then when we found it Was able to reach just a hint of the melancholy that now envelops us.