Creating A Character
On A Whim
I created a character
this morning after reading a post on Facebook. Someone I know wrote that she
had the weight of the world on her shoulders, and that was sad to me. Is it
one’s outlook that creates such a heavy load? Is it life’s circumstances? What
can one do to feel better? I hope my friend’s problems subside a bit this day.
I truly do, but I smugly have to thank her for making me think and for creating
a conduit for my creativity to flow a bit. Maybe I’ll use the character I
invented below in a future story.
She was awake at midnight. Her
world was dark, save for a full moon that filled the sky with golden light so
bright it made her wonder. “Is anyone out there wandering about and feeling as dejected
as I do?”
She held herself rigid and still hoping
the silence surrounding her would stop the chaos in her mind for it was awhirl
with problems that badgered her like an angry cat.
“I’m burdened with responsibilities I didn’t
bargain for when I took on this job of motherhood some thirteen years ago,” she
told herself.
Her own mother had said many times, “Life
happens, Mona. You have to take the bad along with the good,” and then she died
at fifty leaving her twenty-year-old daughter to her own devices.
Mona had never liked hearing her
mother’s words. They bore in on her, twisting like a knife in her gut. “It’s a
negative outlook,” Mona had thought many times, and yet, in her mid-thirties,
now, with a thirteen year old, pot-smoking, snarling adolescent on her hands
the words were ringing true as never before.
And there was the husband, such as
he was. He wasn’t around much and when he was he smelled of too many beers and
his nose ran incessantly from sniffing too much white powder through his
nostrils. The marriage was still intact legally, but that was the extent of
their togetherness. They hadn’t been intimate for years. He couldn’t and she
didn’t want to be bothered, so they went their separate ways most days, he to
his job as a mechanic in town, and she to the local animal shelter where she
kept the books and pined for lost and abandoned animals that would not likely
find homes and would end up in a garbage heap somewhere. It broke her heart.
So, here’s my no-so-happy
character. Some day, in a story sometime, maybe I can help her sort out her
woes.
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