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1  Creative Writing / Critiques Corner / trying to decide if it has a flow and moves in a central direction on: September 25, 2011, 10:37:21 pm
Point of View: AJ Poole
Location: Los Angeles
YEAR:  Summer of 2045

AJ sat down on her father’s chair in his office and she began to fiddle with the hem of the black dress she forced herself to put on in order to attend her parents funeral. She still couldn’t believe that her mom and dad were really gone and really dead and really not coming through the door of the house she grew up in.
   “Hey, little one, you ready?” asked Danielle from the doorway of her brother’s study.
   AJ wished she could answer no, but she knew that she would never be ready to say goodbye to her parents, so she nodded. AJ picked up the journals in front of her, that she had stayed up to finish reading. The previous night she marked her favorite passages from both of her parent’s journals and intended to read them as part of her eulogy.
   AJ walked out of her father’s study and closed the door behind her. She faced the stairs that would lead her to a car that would take her to her mother’s dance studio where everyone had decided the wake should be for her parents would be.
   The car pulled up to Camille’s studio, AJ got out of her car and walked up the steps of the studio. As AJ approached the door into the studio she took a steadying breath and pushed the door open. The people who had arrived before her turned and watched her enter the room. She stalled before continuing the walk towards the podium that someone had set up at the other end of the room. As AJ made her way towards the podium the voices of the people her parents once knew quieted down before eventually fading out all together. When AJ reached the podium she turned and faced the people who are waiting for her to give her eulogy. She set the journals she had brought with her down on the podium and turned to her favorite entries. She looks up from the journals and stares out at the crowd in front of her. She looks back down at the journals and closes them shut instead.
   She closes her eyes and takes another steadying breath and begins a eulogy that comes from the heart; not one that she wrote the night before with anecdotes from her parents past.
   “My parents, Oliver and Camille Poole, were fifty- three when a drunk driver T-boned their car on their way home from an award ceremony in my father’s honor and they were killed on the Pacific Coast Highway. In their fifty-three years of life they had loved, lost and loved again. Not always each other, but usually each other. They had four kids. Dad had plenty of wins between Oscars and Emmys and even more nominations. Mom owned this dance studio that started out as one that taught everyday people and ended up becoming one where stars and ordinary people learned how to dance side by side where everyone there was equals; but the always managed to get home before seven o’ clock almost every night. Dad helped my siblings and I with my English and History homework and Mom helped with Science and Math.
   “Mom and Dad had careers where cheating on your spouse not only usually happened, but was expected to happen at some point in their marriage, but Mom and Dad never did; they were always true to each other. To the press they had the perfect marriage; never had an argument or a harsh thing to say to the other one, but behind closed doors, and my brother and sisters can vouch for this, they had some serious verbal, knock-down drag out arguments that sometimes ended up with Dad sleeping on the couch and Mom slamming the door to their room closed. In the morning though, when we came downstairs for breakfast, Mom would be sleeping on the couch with Dad. Before we woke them up because we didn’t want to make our own breakfast, we saw how peaceful they both looked. It always surprised me, even has I got older, after one of their fights and they were sleeping on the couch; they both look like they had never fought with anyone about anything before. They always made up and never seemed to fight about the same thing twice.
   “A couple of nights ago my brother, sisters and I were going through Mom and Dad’s stuff and we found a trunk full of stuff. The come thing in these trunks is that there is a note from Mom and Dad, plus a few journals that they wrote for us.” AJ held up one of the journals that she had brought with her, “these journals have everything about their lives, the good, the bad and everything in between. These journals talked about everything my parents went through since meeting each other the summer before the freshmen year of high school. Their story inspires me and makes me believe that love can be a person needs to get by. For Mom and Dad all they needed was each other.
   “As sad as their deaths make me; I am glad that they went together, because if there is one thing that these journals have taught me, it’s that they did everything together and they should have left this world together and not separately. Both had amazing careers, but what I think everyone in this room will remember isn’t their careers, but their relationship with one other and how well matched for each other they were.
   “There was one story that my dad wrote that stuck out to me, it was about when his father died. He wrote that he hated the twenty-one gun salute and the procession that was given to a fallen soldier and he wrote that he thought it would be better to just have a party celebrating a loved one’s life instead of mourning their ending. So in honor of Mom and Dad, I think we should raise a glass to them and turn up the music, exchange stories about them.” AJ grabbed a shot glass from the table behind her and lifted the amber liquid to her lips and drank the shot.
   The people in front of AJ clapped and all raised their glasses that had various different liquids in them and drank to the lives of Oliver and Camille Poole. 
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