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Write a creative nonfiction piece about something you're grateful for.

Posted in Nonfiction on Jul 26, 2024

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✍️ 66 stories

Out of the Ashes - Allowing for Transformative Compassion

Submitted to Contest #261

This story may trigger emotions if you've been in an event where lives and/or property were lost. The title was inspired from Gregg Braden's "Ancient Essenes' Message on the Three Words From 2500 Years Ago" video on YouTube. Write a creative nonfiction piece about something you're grateful for. The call came on my cell phone around 12:45 PM. I was at work, on a lunch break.  The voice on the other end of the phone said, “Don’t even bother coming home. You won’t be able to.” That’s not a call you want to receive. ...

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Torn-Up Sneakers

Submitted to Contest #261

I'm grateful for torn-up sneakers. It had been about a month since we called the relationship quits. Or rather, you called it quits for the both of us. I knew that there was nothing left to salvage, but my heart still yearned to fight for you, for us. I felt like I had so much more left to give, and now couldn't. We still lived together while I made other arrangements, but I could not bring my eyes to meet yours anymore. I was so disappointed in myself for not being able to make us work. Disappointed in the dates I had planned in my head, bu...

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We Nearly Lost our Son

Submitted to Contest #261

Todd was born September 14, 1966. He was a happy, contented baby. If we’d stopped with him I’d have never understood mothers who were frazzled because the baby was getting into things. If Todd found something on the floor he gave it to me. It didn’t go into his mouth. While I was pregnant with our second baby and couldn’t get around much, Todd would sit on the floor near my chair and play with his toys.He was 14 ½ months old when Amy was born. He seemed to think she was okay and would come for me if she cried and I wasn’t there immediately. ...

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Fahrenheit 212

Submitted to Contest #261

My blood begins to boil as my resentments rise.The temperature in my suite is edging up to combustion level. I’m almost willing to endure the 450+F. that promises to destroy those things that bug me the most.I’ve been told I need to leave my apartment for 8 hours while this intrusive treatment takes place.I’m not happy. Water boils at 212F. Apparently it freezes at 32F.Hell’s bell’s for elections that’s mighty cold, I’m thinking about running and jumping into the hot pot.I sullenly turn to the one remedy that has served me well over the yea...

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Gratitude Mapping for Dummies

Submitted to Contest #261

I lay the posterboard on the table in preparation to plot my gratitude map. I contemplate what topics I want to include to best describe what I appreciate about my life. After much thought, I write down in the center the word gratitude. Next, I write my wife and daughter near the top. I spread out other topics on my posterboard that includes my military career, college experience, time in Japan, the states I have lived in, the schools I have attended, the individual experiences most don’t get an opportunity to, and my successes and fail...

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when they are dying

Submitted to Contest #261

“John, are you there?” I wrote. There was a long silence as I laid on my bed that night, it was little after 9pm. I had just put my only son, king to sleep. The son I held tightly to my chest as he went through episodes during the night. King was only A year old when his daycare suspected he had autism in 2018. see, where I came from, I don’t recall this happening. I am a west African. I was Born and raised in Monrovia, Liberia until the civil war of 1989, I migrated here with my aunt and uncle. In our country We don’t label mental...

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THE GIFT OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

Submitted to Contest #261

I awoke this morning with the words “thank you” on my lips. This occurrence has been going on for at least the last fifty years. I’ve experienced joys and sorrows like most humans I know. With all of these experiences, there have been lessons taught and learned; sometimes repeated. Yes, I have found it is possible to learn from sorrows, as well as joys. I have come to believe that such learning is why I am living my life here on planet Earth. Here and now is where the potential to gain greater understanding is rife in every human experience ...

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Lone Drops Fill up a Glass

Submitted to Contest #261

The metal grid of a spring frame is the first thing I see when I wake up; it rests along the wall that my mattress is laid on the floor in front of. My new mattress is a dream but it’s too big for my trundle -I don’t have a storage unit and so that’s just what my room has become. Funny, I’ve been here before; I actually have taken naps in a storage unit I rented when I didn’t yet have a place to room in. By the grace of some God, I had a friend that loaned his van to me while he was out of town. I would drive around aimlessly, piecing togeth...

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She Was My Friend

Submitted to Contest #261

"I have a really nice purple haze." Those were the words that kept ringing in my head. Speeding home in my car, I was stunned. I kept replaying the events over in my head to make sense of it all. It was supposed to be a meeting with my hair stylist friend, who I hadn't seen in a year. A lot can change in a year. I got a text from Denise stating that I should visit her at her new salon location. It's common for hair stylists to reach out to update clients, and I thought nothing of it. It was convenient since I had recently relocated closer t...

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The Greatest Gift I Never Received

Submitted to Contest #261

The Greatest Gift I Never Received Carol Hendrickson I was her first, and for a very long time, her only granddaughter. Some of my earliest recollections of my maternal grandmother, Hanora “Nonie” Ruede, were of her showering me with affection, attention and gifts, often from afar. When I was a young child, she and her two sisters, my great aunts “Mamie” (Mary) and “Miggie” (Margaret), along with Miggie’s crippled daughter Catherine, arrived at each of my birthday parties laden with an ornately-decorated cake from West High Bakery...

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The Phenomenal Power of a Fractured Mind

Submitted to Contest #261

TW: CSA, suicidal ideation, mental illness I gritted my teeth so hard they squeaked. The physical compression was all that was keeping me from screaming. I checked the clock—2:25. Still ninety minutes left on my shift. The thing had been banging on the inside of my skull all day. It was as if there was a door in my brain, and some entity was knocking incessantly. It wanted to tell me something; I could feel its urgency like a physical sensation, but every time I considered letting it in, an unparalleled terror smashed into me. I returned to...

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The Gift My Cat Gave: A Heartfelt Journey.

Submitted to Contest #261

Like most of us, seventeen years ago my life was completely different. I was living in Killeen, TX waiting to get married. It was the first time living away from my family. Killeen is a small army town about an hour north of Austin. Outside of the army base Killeen is made up of bars, tattoo parlors and strip clubs. Growing up in the suburbs of Ohio, I was out of my element. I was in the middle of nowhere with no friends and a fiancé I barely knew. Whenever I found myself homesick, got upset or was angry I couldn’t take off in my car, drive ...

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An Ephemeral Journey

Submitted to Contest #261

An Ephemeral JourneyBy Henry CembrolaAfter a long and arduous heartbreaking six year struggle of trying to see my two daughters for my visitation rights, to protect them from evil, something amazing happened. In 2003 after immensely heavy emotional pain I laid down crying to God asking, “Why is this happening to me?” “Why is this happening to my children?” I yelled to God at the top of my voice, “I can’t take this anymore.” I cried so hard I thought my heart was going to burst right there on the living room floor. My heart was, literally, in...

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This Body of Mine

Submitted to Contest #261

cw: this story contains subjects regarding mental health, self harm, eating disorders and body image issues. As someone who hit another major decade last year, the (once) dreaded 30s, there are many aspects of my life that I am grateful for. I could talk for days about the endless support I have received from my now tight knit group of girlfriends who are always at the end of a phone if needed. I could mention the health of my family, the fact that my parents are still with me when so many around me have grieved the loss of a loved one. I c...

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Portraits of Delight

Submitted to Contest #261

Portraits of delight! Oh, to squat down beside the second-to-last shelf of a midwest gift shop. A score of metal frogs of screw and nail with wild whimsy faces dwell here. They hold crude instruments and make up the members of a slipshod toadstool band. Their phillips head eyes and wire-bent arms holding cellos, trumpets, drums, and flutes of hex nuts and washers. One must imagine them playing chrome canticles for the royal courts of Midleaf Valley, or steel-pan jigs in the old saloons of Stained Glass Gorge. Perhaps their patrons reward th...

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