Prompt #59: Memory is Tricky

After all the business I give to Amazon in shopping and services, they finally reciprocated this month by sending me a gift of their own. As a Prime member I received a free-with-no-strings-attached Audible of James Taylor's Break Shot: My First 21 Years. I kid you not. I didn't need to start an account or even give them a credit card to start my "free trial."

I knew this would be something I wanted to give uninterrupted time to, so I hung onto for several days without even clicking the link. A couple of friends made sure to tell me about it in case I had missed it, but I was well ahead of them. Waiting for just the right moment.

I opened it up, then cooked and ate my breakfast while listening. I took it to the shower and then on a commute to a work meeting 45 minutes away. As much I thought I knew about James Taylor, I learned a lot I didn't know. I also learned from his story that some of what I thought I knew was wrong- myth or urban legend. JT was the perfect company for my rush hour highway drive. I laughed, I cried, and I wrote this down. I knew this would be my offering for this month's prompt:

Memory is tricky. We remember how it felt and not necessarily how it was... I think many of us keep trying to work out just exactly what happened in our early years. We want to go back and fix something that has already vanished, and can never be corrected. But we can correct it in a song, and a book, and a poem, and a play. One of the nice things that art does is to make things rhyme, to tie up loose ends. Sometimes you can even slap on a happy ending.

This is our prompt. To recall a memory of our own and fix it, change the ending. Or to create a fictional character who wishes to change the course of events in their own lives. You may even choose a character you know and love, or hate, and change their story or their ending. As James tells us, the artist can do that. Choose your genre, choose your path.