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.