Silver - just some writing

My mind has been brimming with little stories, character sketches, and other things lately.  It's like the start of summer sent a creative surge through my brain.  Which is awesome, but I'm trying to focus on my current WIP right now, and all these great ideas can be VERY distracting.  So I had an idea.  Just as listening to that song in your head makes it quiet down (at least for a little while), I thought if I did a bit of writing on just one of these ideas, maybe they'd all shut up for awhile and I can focus on my space opera. :)

As I was falling asleep last night, some lines were flickering in my head - less story than character sketch, but I thought I'd put them down.  And, since I'm trying to write more in the blog, I figured why not put them down for all to see? :)

~~~

Silver -

I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't know about death.  No one had to teach me; it was just something that wove itself through my childhood like the silver thread woven through the quilt my dead grandma made me.

I was born exactly one year after the death of my uncle, the one I never met.  In some ways, I knew him, Paul, better than I knew my living aunts and uncles.  His photograph stared at me from every room in the house we shared with my grandparents.  His name lingered always just behind the last word of every conversation, as if the walls themselves whispered it.  I still remember the way the air around us would turn thick like syrup if anyone slipped up and actually did mention his name out loud.  If someone said it, "Paul," time stopped for a few seconds, freezing us in that moment until we could push it away again and go on with life.

There is a lot of responsibility being the first born after a death.  Though no one said it, even before kindergarten I knew that I was more than just the first grandchild.  The more religious of the family believed I was sent to them.  The spiritual thought I was Paul reincarnated.  And even to those whose views were less articulated, I was the Silver Lining, the light shining behind the dark cloud of death.

If anything, I was a constant reminder of him.  I learned to tell the difference between someone looking at me, the new baby born into this family, versus someone looking at his memory.  When they looked through me, a sad smile on their lips and softly glazed eyes, I knew they weren't seeing me at all.  But that was alright; at least they had a smile, even if sad.  At least I made them smile at all.

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And that's all we have today, folks. :)  Thanks for reading!

AMC