Tags
burning, candle, fiction, letting go, old boyfriend, past, photos, scriptic, short story, Trifecta, writing prompt
She never seemed to be able to get away from him, no matter what she tried. Every time she thought she had forgotten him, he popped back into her life. It has been years since they had been together, yet he still dominated her thoughts. He would smile if he knew that he still could control her, even after all this time. She knew it was time to change things.
After all, if he still controlled her now then he might control her still in the year 2019, ten years after he left her. Did she want to end up on her deathbed, decades from now, looking back at a life that was never truly her own after she met him?
She lit a candle, watching the flame flicker to life, the aroma of apples and cinnamon filling the air. She hated the smell of cinnamon, but he had insisted on getting these candles. She wondered if it was only because he knew she couldn’t stand the smell. But even now she couldn’t bring herself to buy anything but apple cinnamon because of him.
Blue and green smoke trailed into the air as the flame devoured old pictures of him. She burned every picture she owned from when they were together. She knew she needed to purge him from her life, but now she needed to add the real fuel to the fire.
She grabbed her box of mementos, which once had been small enough to fit in her dresser drawer but now had to be kept in her closet, and pulled out the memories of him. His old sweatshirt that he always wore, a half-eaten box of milk duds from their first date, and the toenail clippers he kept by the bed were among the casualties of the night. As she watched them engulfed in the raging fire she smiled, feeling free for the first time in years. By burning away the past, she finally found a way to let go.
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I blame this post on watching too much Friends lately. When I was given my Scriptic prompt for this week, I immediately thought of the episode where they burn things from their old boyfriends. What else was I supposed to do with a candle, toenail clippers, and a box of milk duds!?
This post actually fulfills two prompts: Scriptic and Trifecta.
For the Scriptic.org prompt exchange this week, Barb Black at http://blackinkpad.blogspot.com gave me this prompt: a candle, toenail clippers, and a box of milkduds
I gave Jester Queen at http://jesterqueen.com this prompt: He finally did it. After years of failure he…
For Trifecta we needed a post between 33 and 333 words that used the third definition of Year:
YEAR (noun)
2: a cycle in the Gregorian calendar of 365 or 366 days divided into 12 months beginning with January and ending with December
3 : a calendar year specified usually by a number <died in the year 1900>
Author David Wiley 