Memories - Excerpt from 'Her Father's Daughter' | Teen Ink

Memories - Excerpt from 'Her Father's Daughter'

November 21, 2022
By elliewu GOLD, Irvine, California
elliewu GOLD, Irvine, California
11 articles 10 photos 4 comments

Favorite Quote:
Even when you face a difficult moment and fall a little bit behind, as if you’re doing a long jump, wouldn’t you have a longer runway to be able to jump further?


I sigh and breathe deeply, trying to calm my accelerating heart. My mind unravels as a void of unwanted memories stream through a foggy and forgotten haze.

Old, buried memories pour out, suddenly restored. Reminders of a father. Of a mother. And of a brother. I close my eyes and smell a home. A home of wood, dirt, and flowers. I hear the wind, the shutting of a door, the heavy footsteps of boots trudging down the hallway, and a fire sputtering. I feel a warmth that envelopes me and a long-forgotten bliss that seems as if it had always been inside of me, just hidden away beneath the ashes of my memories.

I open my eyes and am brought back into reality. The warmth is gone, instead replaced by a chill. A cold and bitter truth. The truth of what my life really is.


The author's comments:

Like what was said in the title, this is an excerpt from a novel I had been writing last year called "Her Father's Daughter." The context of this illustration is an teenage orphan girl who, so far, has survived life by thieving. Before this moment that I've written, she had just met an orphan boy the same age as her who brought her to a home where an older lady lived in order to clean wounds that she had just recieved. Without the girl knowing, she had entered a safe place where this lady took in orphan children from all over the city, giving them a place to live and eat and play, with this boy having once been very much like herself - an orphan who submitted to a thieving life - but this lady was the one who helped him through his darkness and allowed him to help others instead. Now, at the moment that is going on now, this orphan girl has just been encouraged to face her dark and cruel past of how she became an orphan in the first place, and, for the first time in her life, she is pouring out the memories and secrets that she buried deep within.


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