Part 5

Dear Friends and Gentle Readers,

     I know that I've been going on about being more positive around here, but that's not really being authentic. I have been having a hard time emotionally, and it's really not in me to thing of pleasant or informative things to write about. Thankfully, the name of this blog is "First Person Narrative" and as such, I feel that I am able to forego actual blog posts for a while and just share some of my writing with you. 

     In March, I shared with you an excerpt from a larger essay I wrote about going home and visiting the cemetery. Over the next two weeks, while I do some serious self-care, I am going to share the rest of this story with you. I hope you enjoy it. 

xo,

     Uranium J

Click here to read the first part of the essay.
Click here for Part 2.
Click here for Part 3.
Click here for Part 4.

Part 5

Of course neither he nor his mother lives in that orange house now. When I was there today I looked across the street and you couldn’t even see it. The shrubs near the front door had grown so large that they obscured everything but the steps leading up to the porch. I noticed this as I was making my way to the Catholic part of the cemetery to visit Heather. While she was such a big part of all that had gone on, I never imagined that I would be paying her a visit from six feet topside. She was there for all of it. I know that she had to have listened to my William scenario more than once and I had invented a future for her as well.

I decided that if things didn’t work out for me and Will, I was going to take a road trip to Hollywood with her and George after he got a car (he was almost 16, so this could work) and I was going to woo Christian Slater. We were going to move back to Crescent City and his mom was going to buy us my dream house – a huge Victorian mansion on the lake. Heather and George would get married and live in Jacksonville. I would have an airboat and take the river to visit her while Christian was away making movies. When she came home to visit me and her family, she would stay in the yellow house on Randolph Street that I had bought her and drive around in the yellow car I had for her to use. Being married to a famous movie star, I would have enough money to make all this happen. This was before Christian Slater was officially B-List, by the way.

As I was making my way back to the car, I noticed a large pink granite headstone and remembered the first time I was ever in that cemetery. I was standing with my mom and my aunt Ida and Uncle Gene underneath  the oak tree that now shades my dad’s grave. It was April and I would fall in love with Christian Slater that very night as I watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on the movie of the week.

But at that moment I was standing with my family in attendance at one of the biggest funerals that Crescent City had ever seen. People still talk about the Phemachik murder. A man killed his three little girls, his wife, and his mother in law with a shot gun on the last day of the sheriff’s vacation, about a week before Easter. Sheriff Taylor Douglas came to work that Monday morning fresh from a few days off to a scene of heartbreaking senseless carnage.