Written by RicardoCC

It only seems like yesterday we were strolling along Blackpool beach together. Well, I say strolling, but I mean escaping. Burning time so that we didn’t have to go back to our father: “this holiday will be different, boys” he’d always say. But it never was. He always stayed out late, got drunk and, when he came back to the hotel, he’d beat our mother black and blue for not making the bed or not ordering his dinner for the next day. Then he’d turn on us if we weren’t asleep. Nobody could blame our mother for doing what she did. When they found her…

No, these aren’t the memories we should have. It’s funny how the most devastating and crushing moments in our lives stay with us forever, yet we struggle so to recount the best. Well, except for me, that is. Of course, you were much older than me, you left when I was only small because you had to get away. And I remember you saying you would come back for me. But you never did. Oh, but I don’t condemn you for it, I wouldn’t have wanted to come back either.

But I kept that stone you gave me, even now that I have grown old and wise as my children like to say. I remember it like it was yesterday when you took me out on to Blackpool beach on the last day of our holiday, in the middle of the night, and there was one particular stone which caught the moonlight like no other. You picked it up and do you know what you said? You said that it was a piece of the sky and, as fate would have it, it was almost exactly beneath the light of a distant star – you said that the star was the hole left when it fell out. And you said the stone was me, one of the few who was able to break away from the infinite mass of dullness and make the world a little brighter.

And now here I am, adding the finishing touches to my auto-biography, as I retire from the literary world. Well, I’ll tell you one thing, big brother, wherever you are, you were right. I did shine bright enough to light up the world. And I lit up Blackpool beach, I lit it up with ever story I wrote, every poem I conceived, every word I spoke and every breath I took. I lit it up bright enough so that the whole world could see the stone I left on the beach, almost exactly beneath the light of that distant star. Perhaps time will repeat and I will find you in another life, or perhaps both our lives will remain in that piece of sky.

Only the stars know for sure.

Lighting up lives: Blackpool Pier
Image Courtesy of ephotozine.com