PROMPT #74
The holiday season is often about gift giving, but this year we want you to think about another kind of giving: giving up.
PROMPT:
Write a story about a character who gives up. Maybe they give up their goal of trying to climb to the top of every mountain in the world. Maybe they give up on hoping their partner will watch Star Wars with them. Or maybe they just give up hard liquor until New Year’s Eve. Whatever it is, show us the struggle that they have giving up.
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Giving up is easy. I do it all the time. I’ve made profession of giving up. Jobs, relationships, colleges, you name it, I’ve thrown in the towel. I’m quite successful really. But I won’t lie. It hasn’t been easy. They funny thing about giving up is it gets easier with practice. Try it, I promise. But it gets lonely too, up here at the top.
It started with tae kwan do. I got my yellow belt then used it to tie up my sister’s barbies and hang them from the peak of our roof. This was much more satisfying than pretending to beat people up. I had no patience for such things.
Then there was baseball, then wrestling; even drawing and guitar lessons- all of these I loathed and grew weary of within a few weeks. School itself was next on my list, but I feared the wrath of my teachers more than anything, more than god, more than my mom. So I suffered through it, mostly I stared out the window at the rooftop chimneys and the blue clouds, and dreamed of the day when I could graduate and find more important things to quit.