Passage of Time drabble:

You were 16 when you met him. Almost immediately you knew that you had met your match. He was the first person (though by no means the last) to make you feel ignorant, despite your 4.0 GPA.

You loved him for 5 years. Five long years in which you never once believed yourself to be his intellectual equal. Five long years in which you were willing to make yourself into whoever he wanted you to be, just to get him to love you back.

You've been considered an adult, chronologically, for 15 years now. He's married, and you're a vastly different person than you were so long ago.

He walks in the room and you open your mouth to speak, only to stammer and stumble through something that isn't quite what you had intended to say.

You are 16 again.

Drabble:

Thirty years sure have changed the old wooden house that I lived in when I was in elementary school. Now it is the Psychology Lab building of Davidson College.

Outside, there is a wheelchair ramp leading from the driveway to the kitchen door. Inside, the living room has a new wall down the middle, dividing the reception area from the interview room. The bedrooms are now professors' offices. The laundry room is filled with shelves of office supplies. My old room is filled with a line of tables sporting half a dozen computer work stations.

And they have air conditioning!

Fifteen Years

In my imagination, my parents are eternally as they were when I left for college: a couple in their 50’s, my mother plump, silver-haired, and cheerful, my father full of that restless energy that runs so strongly in our family. What’s left of his hair is more strawberry blond than gray.

Fifteen years have passed. Now when I go home I’m shocked. My mother’s hair is white, and she hates and fears every technological advance, every change in the mores of the society she once understood. And my father is frail, stooped, marked by brushes with death. I won’t have them for long. I feel like I’ve already lost them.

Tep, a suggestion for a future theme: first reactions.

I love love love love these drabbles. Also, they hurt.

Liese, in your drabble, I love the repetition. I also love this line:

We sit on the couch, grinning uselessly. Our eyes are open, but we cannot see what you can, our future.

Tep, you so covered what happens when we confront a younger love. There is one man from my past who would reduce me to 20 in a flat second if I saw him again. I hate that he has that power.

dcp, how interesting to revisit an old home that has been reclaimed for a new use. Have we done a drabble about "coming home"? If not, Tep, could you mark that to use at some point? I also love Deb's "first reactions" suggestion.

Susan, of all the drabbles, yours hits me the hardest. I feel the same way about my own parents--that disconnect between how I still see them and how they are. Your last two lines especially hit me.

She watches the phone ring. If it's him, she'll be old. He freezes her in the headlights of his assumptions, tries to wedge her into the portrait that was a bad likeness even back then.

She'll feel old because it's so much more of a bad fit now than she was then. And because she doesn't have the childish enthusiasm and curiosity to overlook being misjudged. Whoever she is now is stiff and resentful.

She doesn't miss him. She doesn't even miss what they had, fun as it was. She misses the flexibility and the potential of fifteen years ago.

He freezes her in the headlights of his assumptions, tries to wedge her into the portrait that was a bad likeness even back then.

This line is fabulous, ita.

Kristin, it was more weird than I could really get across in 100 words, but I posted the drabble anyway. The house was originally built in about 1910, so it was already old and noisy when we lived there in the early '70s. I was in the area in June of 2003 and just meant to drive by the old house, but when I saw that it was now an office building I decided to see if I could get a tour. I don't think I would have had the courage to knock on the door if it had still been a residence. I found that the things I notice about "what makes a good house" are very different now than when I was ten.

I left out the lines about my memories of the dark dirty cellar with the evil scary boiler that fed the steam radiators in each room. The radiators are still there, but are reduced to being decorative. They use a heat pump in the winter now. All that is left of that whole section is the line about the air conditioning.

That brings up a general question for all the drabblers. Who tends to start with a few key thoughts and expand from there? Who likes to write it all out, and then prune to 100 words? Who can do both?

I almost always have to prune, though I tend to do so pretty quickly. I find the 100 word rule keeps me crisp and forces me to really figure out what's important.