Falling Like May

Prologue

Author's note: Hi! So the chances of this story being continued are quite slim - I have an awful tendancy to leave things unfinished,  and half thought out stories are among my most common. But a few weeks ago I came up with an idea, and I wrote down a page or two, in hopes that it would leave my mind alone to rest, but it didn't. This resulted in me writing a prologue, my first attempt at third person, and because my writing is (very clearly) not great in first person, I can only assume it is going to suck quite a bit in third. But hey, why not? Leave comments, let me know what I need to work on, and let me know if you think continuing would be a good idea, because I'll admit - third person is quite an exciting narrator to take. Anyway, continue reading, it's not very long, but hopefully (fingers crossed) you can get a taste of what the story is like. 

“With my last breath, I’ll exhale my love for you. I hope it’s a cold day, so you can see what you meant to me.
” - Jarod Kintz

You have seen it a thousand times. It slips in to your day, in to your book shelf, in to your monthly visits to the cinema ten minutes down the road. It is in every picture book your Mother ever bought you as a child, back when you were oblivious to the world burning outside the pages of stories. You’ll see it flash behind your eye lids in every lyric, in each sentence by authors – the small town ones and the New York Times Best Sellers alike. It has been read, over and over and over again, imprinted in our generation’s minds like an ink black tattoo, words that once held meaning but now seem almost orthodox and predictable, colourless; dull. They easily fade in to a black and white world as if they were born for it, written for it, sinking in beneath the daily conversations and morning coffees, slipping in beneath tired smiles and weary expressions.

My year eleven English teacher once explained it to me like this:

Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Boy finds some obstacle to prevent him from being with girl. Boy overcomes obstacle. Boy and girl live happily ever after.

It took the romance away from every novel I had ever read, every song I’d ever drawled out, and each word that had escaped my mouth. But he was right. As human beings, we are awfully predictable. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. But I hope by the time we have finished, you realise her story has more to it than this. It could not have been simply written down by following a step by step guide, nor could it have been constructed by a poet, flowing perfectly from line to line. Her life was never a smooth surface; jagged edges always changed the direction, and changed the destination.

I’ve watched her fall so many times throughout her life; off her new bike when she was seven, out of the oak tree in the back garden on her tenth birthday, in love at seventeen and then, sadly, out of love at forty three. Despite May’s unbelievable tendency to fall, it never occurred to me that I would have to watch her final fall, her last ever plunge – her fall in to death.

This is another thing I have heard a thousand times, in a thousand different novel prologues about a thousand different deaths, but never before has this phrase ringed truer to me: it is an extraordinary thing, how fast time flies. Because one moment May was fifteen, with eyes that shone as bright as the sun, and a heart made of the purest gold, and the next she was seventy five, with the same eyes and heart but perhaps just a little wiser.

Her breathing begins to stagger now, like the last drops of rain after a storm. I was happy to say that May had an adventurous life, full of twists and turns even the world’s most impressive author could not keep up with. Or even the world’s most avid reader. I feel her lungs start to collapse, and I thank the heavens that her daughter is here, clutching her hand, desperately trying to give her Mother the life from within her through that one hold. And I pray that her daughter, so carefully named Annabelle, will never lose the light from her eyes, because I have seen it long before, in a woman named May.