I recently came across a blog to which several writers are contributing, so I thought I’d play along. I’m a little late to the game, so I’m catching up.
The first prompt: Put yourself in a moment where you were not fine. Maybe you were terrible, and maybe you were TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. Put yourself back in that moment when you lied. Why did you do it? Whose feelings were you trying to save? Write what you wish you would have said, and imagine where that honest conversation could have led you.
In teaching literature, I so often encounter fate. How do characters change their own fate? Do they have control? What events changed the course of their lives forever? In my own life, I’ve often thought how each relationship I’ve been in has led me to the next in some way, and so to erase the pain of that experience, I wouldn’t have realized the happiness of what followed. I think often of my relationship with my sister, though, and the many ways I contributed to its lesser intimacy over the years. I was a bossy child, often telling her what to do, and she would begrudgingly do it. We’re twins; I’m not sure how I became the one that fell into the role of an “older” sister. Ironically, she’s technically older by about ten minutes. I made amends years later, in an effort to repair all I had wronged, and sometimes it really is too late.