Friday, September 16, 2011

Heartache




This week we’d like you to explore romantic heartbreak. For you fiction writers, here’s a chance to really delve into the psyche of your character. For you non-fiction folk, well, maybe it’s into your psyche you must delve. We all remember that first love, just like we all remember when our hearts broke for the first time.

Write a piece – 600 word limit – about the first heartbreak your character or you experienced.




Alone in the night.  Next to the empty pillow. Pleading for the escape of sleep. 
Dreams of better times, fade to bitter times.
Eyes open to the empty dark.
Soaking the blanket as the heart bleeds through them.

Rise feeling broken in the soft pastel of dawn. Crawling from sheets never warmed.  Leaving behind the pieces of heart, too heavy to gather. 

Meeting the day as half of one. Pretending to smile with stiffened lips.  Weaving through spaces between everyday voices and routines.  The day a blur of aching, empty light. 

Finally free of the need to feign normalcy. Returning to the house that is no longer home.  The silence full of remembered words. The cold kitchen greets no one.  

Sitting on the edge of the bed. Trying to be tired. Trying not to see the empty pillow, the pieces of heartbreak staining the blanket. As the darkness lay waiting. 

3 comments:

  1. Oh my. This sadness, this pain? I can feel it. Ouch.

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  2. The pain is palpable in this. Truly, it's just perfect. The night is awful; the day is awful; it's all just an awful cycle of pain and lonliness. So well written.

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  3. There are some painfully beautiful truths in this, Renee. I particularly liked "a blur of aching, empty light." For me, that summed up the entire piece.

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