Past

Daily writing prompt

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

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It’s early summer and I thumb through an old diary peppered with half faded photographs whose memories are expiring like soured milk.

With her hair curled and her dress perfectly pressed, my grandma smiles out from one of pictures. A lopsided farmhouse imposes on the background. They said I looked like her, but I don’t see it. Her neck is long and her lips full, while both those things are scrawny on me.

But her Y’s look like mine, and her heart yearns for something she can never define. It’s like we both lost something along this journey, and have spent lifetimes searching for it.

To a historian, the past informs the present and serves as a prediction for the future. For a grand-daughter, the past is carried with us. It lives in our hair and our skin, in our smiles and our longings. We are the tellers of history and keepers of memories. We prevent the flame from flickering into smoke.