1974

 All the world's a stage of grief, and every player has a play. A few may even laugh, along the solemn way. 

Stressed out, beyond any doubt.

Do you still write?

Yes.

...

But not like that.

I feel like it helps to process the first and second acts as I enter the third. I feel like it should help. It should help. Help.

Maybe comfort is the word I'm thinking of. Alcohol was a comfort. It was no help.

I've been imagining a character, a young girl born in the 70s, in Texas. Things I can relate to. Early on, maybe she comes to understand that she didn't write her own script. But maybe she can offer her own interpretation of the words on the page. She decides to laugh and share that laughter with others. Her father is an abusive alcoholic. Her mother a high school dropout. She laughs. She has a brother, who is the favorite. She laughs. The father abandons her. She may laugh later, but she will laugh. In her early years, she lays the stones of her laughing wall. She moves. She enamors the boys. She runs away at 13. There are times when she cries, and on this night she removes one of the stones and weeps.

She drops out of high school, marries and has a child. For a time, she laughs without adding any stones to the wall. She divorces, has another child, reunites. Her husband dies, leaving her a widow for the first time. She's still in her first act. 

When we meet her again, it is clear she has been busy. Her children have children. She has gone to school and is happy in a career helping others. She has built a circle of fiercely devoted friends who have the keys to her castle. She meets someone. They marry and build a home. 

One day, she is visited by her brother, whom she hasn't seen in many years. They reminisce about the few memories they have. She surprises him by sharing bits and pieces of a traumatic scene that he thought she had forgotten, or never known. She laughs. I remember.

This is the end of her second act.

We see her a little over a year later. She is a widow once more. It's March. She's in the hospital herself. It's July. 

She calls her brother. He is running somewhere near his neighborhood. He finds a place to sit, on a landscaping boulder near a park. We see him build a cairn as he listens to her talk. She is laughing about the doctor. He's 14, she says. We hear the brother say that he'll come to see her the following Friday. It's a four hour flight. 

A few hours before the flight, she dies. We see the brother sitting by the airplane window, drinking hot tea from a paper cup, taking photos of the clouds, on his way to Texas.

* * * 

She was 51.