Title: My Life Genre: Original work Rating: PG-13 Word count: 568 Not a happy, feel good story. Welcome to my (scary) world. I’m often asked what I want to be remembered for. It’s a bit of a quandary, you know. There are the usual things, like making a contribution to society, helping out, charity, one’s children and the like. Some folks have more lofty goals – they want to cure cancer, or wipeout some other disease, but not me. Mostly, no one pays any attention to me. I’m invisible or might as well be. Occasionally a child will stop and take notice, but I usually send them on their way, promising that we will meet at a later date. It’s a lie, but what the heck. At their age, it’s easy to lie to them. So, I float through life. I go to my job and punch keys into a machine. I make copies, I get coffee, I do whatever my lord and master demands of me. The one thing that gets me through the day is knowing that at the end for it, I will be able to go home and into the arms of my loving family. It was hard at first, being a ward of the state and all. My mother gave me up at birth and it took a lot of work to track her down. She is a lovely person and seemed genuinely saddened that we didn’t share my childhood. I understood. She was young and my father had been a mere shadow in the night, for the most part. It wasn’t until much later that she told me my father’s name and I, with her blessings, sought him out. To say he was surprised, well, that would be the understatement of the year. Yet, he had to admit in the end, I had his eyes. What we lacked as a young family, we now enjoyed. I took a wife and eventually two children, a boy and a girl, joined our happy little group. Oh, the stories and the laughs we all had. And I knew that there was no one in the world happier than me. At least, that was the case until one day. I knew it couldn’t last forever. People change, they grow distant, often without meaning to. For us, it was an inopportune arrival of a meter reader for the local gas line. I didn’t know there was a leak or I would have done something about it. By the time I did, it was too late and my greatest fears were with me again. In one fateful moment, all that we had built together was gone and I was alone - again. I tried to be patient, but time was running out for me. By the time I acquired a second wife, and, happily, she came with children, thank heavens, it was too late. Sadly, suddenly I became very visible and the people at work who thought knew me, abandoned me left and right. So, here I sit, alone and with only my thoughts to comfort me. I miss my family… I miss hearing my mother’s voice, even when all she could do was scream and miss seeing my father’s eyes, in a jar by my bed, miss and knowing I was someone. It’ll happen again, I know it. Just takes some time for the dust to settle. So you ask, what do I want to be remembered for? That’s the easiest question in the world. Not to get caught, of course…