As dawn breaks hesitantly over a restless world, the narrator finds themselves trapped in a cycle of echoes—words that chant, haunt, and demand. Haunted by the memory of a mother’s misguided resilience and the void left by an absent father, they navigate a landscape of inner voices and existential uncertainty. Echoes of Absence is a poignant exploration of the self, where past mistakes and unspoken truths weave a tapestry of longing, resistance, and reluctant understanding.
It was at dawn when everything was wrong. These words, they could be anything else, but they want to become themselves, to torment me from where they came. Oh, it’s so wrong, almost like a song, singing, chanting, all night long. I said to them, “Be gone; have some mercy; please, be gone!”
But they ignored me. They persisted, their voices twisting through the air, unrelenting. They kept telling me.
Yes, my mother narrated the story of my birth. My father had vanished forever, leaving me. She told me I needed to be resilient, to find strength where none should exist. Yet even as she spoke, I knew—she was wrong. The words, her words, felt wrong.
“Be gone,” I whisper again. “I want it gone.”
But how can I rid myself of my birth? How can I unravel what has already been made, undo what has always been? It’s wrong; I am wrong, and that’s why they are wrong.
Hear me. Listen to them, those words echoing endlessly from the place in me that’s been wrong all along.
Prompt: Write a story that begins with an unsettling sensation—a feeling that something in the world is inherently wrong. Use fragmented, repetitive sentences to reflect the narrator’s mental state. Explore themes of inherited burdens, personal identity, and the struggle to reconcile inner voices with external realities. Push the boundaries of narrative by weaving abstract elements with moments of sharp, vivid clarity.