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Write a story about someone coming to terms with how different they are from their younger self.

Posted in Angst on Nov 25, 2022

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✍️ 49 stories

Like When We Were Teenagers

Submitted to Contest #174

TW: swearing, drug use, sex, silly nonsense. Filling both of their glasses with a heavy pour of their favorite red wine, Charles looked up at his wife and smiled. “Well, dear, I think we should get a divorce.”The wine would have gone flying directly into his face if not for Martha’s quick reflexes corking her mouth with the unused cloth napkin that had sat quaintly in her lap. “What?!”Chuckling nonchalantly and reaching out to hold her hand – Martha was too in shock to pull away – Charles said, “Oh, come on, Martha, don’t look at me like tha...

42 likes 28 comments 28
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Fish haven't any Feelings

Submitted to Contest #174

My wife walks down the hall and asks me to put my hand in her pocket.I comply.She's asking what the day has given -- more specifically "If [I] know what [I] have been given?" For all the fresh air, unlimited clothes drying on the line, and the beauty of a sand yard.Ummm... I try to tell her that I am grateful. "I even collected the spiders (with a vacuum using your lingerie,) See?"She wants to see the jar where I put the spiders. It's a Vlassic jar that once housed salt, garlic, "natural spices" and pickles. "That's good. That's very fine wo...

31 likes 13 comments 13
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Farewell to Adelaine

Submitted to Contest #174

Adelaine finished the draft of the text and pressed save, rolling her eyes and drawing in a breath. Looking around from the safety of a Lexus, the parking garage felt empty. It was early. That didn't stop the tension from surfacing. Rereading the unsent text, she pressed the button to turn off the screen and plucked the goggle-eyed shades from the visor and pulled the earpieces out with a lip still soft from a hot shower, and slid the sunglasses on to hide her face.Pulling a hood over her still-damp hair, the car chirped as the door clunked....

25 likes 9 comments 9
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Where Have You Gone, Peter Pan?

Submitted to Contest #174

Where Have You Gone, Peter Pan?“When I was child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reasonas a child; when I became a man, I put away the things of a child.” 1 Corinthians: 11-13I shave in the shower now. There’s no mirror in there. I don’t even want to see who I’ve become. Too many wrinkles, too many lines, not enough hair, no color. Sometimes, by sheer accident and the laws of probability and statistics, I’ll catch a glimpse of the old man in the mirror above the bathroom sink. I’m not even sure who he is.What happened? I ...

25 likes 28 comments 28
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Coming Of Age

Submitted to Contest #174

Coming of age is such a way to engross the mind. Think about life in general but swallow the pride. I can't help but face choices that can't divide. Living and dying, forgetting they coincide.Enervated and in my dotage. I swam through the river because there was no bridge. I didn't want to drown because there are reasons to live. Upset those that hate but respect who forgive. In a desolate home with time and patience. Love comes to visit with karma as surveillance. In my bed, stretched out with my thoughts veracious. Angry, then calm, t...

23 likes 20 comments 20
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So Yesterday

Submitted to Contest #174

"I swear sixteen was yesterday, but now I'm closer to twenty eight," I hear my sister Britney singing the lyrics from some new Instagram reel trend in the bedroom next to mine. "You turned sixteen just yesterday," I mutter. Britney has an amazing voice, and I think she can make it to the big record companies one day. One day, I’ll be in the crowd waving glow sticks and huge posters for her as she blasts out those original pop tunes. I am jealous of her, because I don’t have a special talent that everyone can admire. For now, even though ...

20 likes 3 comments 3
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Last Seen on the Corner of Melonbee and Fig

Submitted to Contest #174

Stop looking for me, Vivian. I command you. Your efforts are futile and beginning to border on idiotic. I can no longer stand it—watching you and your makeshift search crew of suburban moms pace up and down Melonbee and Fig Street, looking for the very being who terrorized you for years.With my omniscient feline eye, I'm aware of everything happening in this and every moment—the neon green LOST CAT signs stapled to the necks and torsos of the weeping cherry trees; your Lululemon-clad troop of PTA moms flooding every rosebush with t...

20 likes 7 comments 7
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The Void Between the Living and the Dead

Submitted to Contest #174

I float in the void between the living and the dead. Between memories and actuality, with no identifiable time, space or purpose.It’s cold, I think, but I cannot feel the shivers as they run up my spine. It’s quiet, I think, deafening maybe, but I don’t hear the usual ringing in my ears. It’s empty here, and isolating, I imagine, but I feel nothing.As I float, or maybe walk, through this abyss, the darkness around me begins to lighten. Growing larger and brighter now, I can make out the familiar white frame of an approaching doorway. I glide...

17 likes 3 comments 3
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Desires are made for slaughter

Submitted to Contest #174

He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t understand what his eyes were seeing. The mass continues to spin in front of him, flesh layering over flesh and teeth scraping across puss-filled wounds, smearing the awful liquid across itself. Once he thought he saw an arm poking out, but it quickly twisted and cracked to turn in to a head, then it split open and became a claw, then it melted into a tentacle and then it disappeared back beneath the congregation of organs that continue to spin around itself like a hungry dog looking for its tail.For a mom...

16 likes 0 comments 0
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My Apology

Submitted to Contest #174

August 1 I didn't realize what I had until it was gone. I didn't realize how much I needed you, how much I misunderstood you. I didn't realize just how much I was ungrateful for. August 2 I miss being you. Being the YOU I understood. But now I'm not anymore. I'm just..me. I should clarify, in case anyone finds these letters. These are my letters of apology. August 3 My name is Ruben, and as you're aware, I'm 35 years old. These last few months have been pretty rough on me. I've escaped a near death situation, but now I'm in hot...

15 likes 3 comments 3
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Life-Death River

Submitted to Contest #174

I killed you. My heart raced as I stumbled to my feet from my affectionate bed.  Suddenly the bedroom door pounded like the thoughts in my dreams. “Danny,” my bewildered and inebriated Chinese father called. “What?” my properly irritated American response bellowed as I quickly threw clothes on. My bedroom door flew open, apologizing before the reprimand.  “You’re always responding with this sense of entitlement when will you get that…,” his slurred voice trailed as I walked pass him out to the hallway towards the city bus. You kill...

15 likes 0 comments 0
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The Song of "Someday"

Submitted to Contest #174

Millie stares right through her mug of green tea. There's nothing particularly special about the day, but she feels off somehow. Two hours of practice daily from age 10 to 16. Three to four hours of practice and study from age 16 to 18, daily. Minimum six hours of practice and two of study from age 18 to 19, daily. She sees the band room where she first put together her flute and learned to read music, then the bedroom she set up to practice in those first few years. Somehow they had the same wine-colored carpet, though the bedroom's flo...

14 likes 7 comments 7
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Change is Beautiful

Submitted to Contest #174

Story contains themes of substance abuse, self-harm, mental health and violence.Nothing stays the same, I know that now. But I wasn't always so aware of the ideology that life must change to be lived healthily and safely. Instead, I pushed this truth further away and it left me lost and alone in an abyss that I didn't know could exist. I thought there was no coming back. Is this what my younger self would've wanted? At the young age of fourteen, my obedience to my mother started to dwindle. I started staying out later than I was supposed t...

12 likes 4 comments 4
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The Door Closes

Submitted to Contest #174

“I can’t believe I heard those toxic words coming out of your mouth!” This sentence has been bugging me since yesterday. True, the Emily of five years ago could never have behaved as she did a day ago, but then she also could have been in a better place now, couldn’t she? But James would never get that. After all, it was his mother. How could he put up with the fact that his wife was humiliating his GOD-LIKE Mother? He was mortified. And it was justifiable too. But wasn’t it also his responsibility to protect me from his mother’s poisonous w...

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The Worker Bee Song

Submitted to Contest #174

Two kinds of people make apiaries. Bee farms, honeyholes, whatever people called them they stayed the same, and their founding. Either the founder loved bees, or he loved money.  My father was the first kind. As a young child in the country, he was obsessed with the creatures. On chubby hands and knees he would crawl across the grass and sit in silence, peering at a flowered bush covered in the singing bees. Clint Denvers watched them dance and sing for as long as his parents would allow, as sooner than later they would swoop him up a...

12 likes 3 comments 3
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