From the Vault-Short Fiction (Installment 1 of 5)

I have enjoyed creative writing for as long as I can remember. It was always one of my favorite things to do in school. I loved to write things that I thought my teachers would enjoy or that I thought might make my friends laugh. At that stage of my life, that was about as far as my writing went. I always had a dream to be a writer but never had the guts to really try. I suppose it was fear of rejection. Whatever the case, I was into my forties before writing for publication became a reality for me. The recent release of The Carter Journals: Time Travels in Early U.S. History rekindled the spark of my passion for writing. This blog has given me another outlet for it in recent weeks.

Tonight, it occurred to me that I kept some of those silly stories I used to write back in high school. I went digging through some files and found some of them. I thought it would be fun to give them new life by publishing them here on my blog. I don’t know how many I will decide to post, but I will start with at least this one and see how it goes.

Let’s get in the “Way Back Machine” and travel back to yesteryear to see what was on my squishy young brain.

“Love is Blind” 

By Shane Phipps (1/14/85)

He loved her beyond reason. He loved her without questioning anything. He loved her unconditionally. He loved her in the truest spirit of love. For, in the final analysis, can love truly exist without faith? Anyone could easily see that his love for her was strongly undergirded by faith; even blind faith.

He had never really and truly seen her, at least not for what she actually was. But he loved her with every fiber of his being. Without her in his world, life would be pointless. At least that is the way he viewed things. In fact, it could be said that she WAS the way he viewed things. After all, it was she who gave his life direction. It was she who was always there for him when the world seemed unforgiving and dark. It was she who had never asked him to be someone he was not. She alone knew his unique and special needs…and he knew hers. It was as if they had been created for one another. It was as if she was an extension of him, as if they were one.

The day she left him, his world shrank to nothing. He withdrew into a shell of utter darkness. He could not even bring himself to step outside his home. He felt confined…imprisoned. He felt utterly abandoned and helpless. At first he tried to convince himself that it hadn’t been his fault. He had to try because knowing he was the one to blame would be more than he could bear. How could he live with himself knowing he was responsible for the loss of the one thing he could never afford to lose? How could he live with himself knowing he had let her get away? Yet, try as he might, he could find no other alternative. He was to blame. He had left the door ajar.

He decided that he could not go on. He decided life held nothing for him without her. He was absolutely certain that nothing could fill her void. Grief, like a dark cloud, overshadowed all reason. Fumbling and stumbling his way to the medicine cabinet, he was totally convinced he could never find another seeing-eye dog to fill Muffy’s place in his life.