By: Linna Amanda
Under that big bright yellow sun, he
stood still. Aside from the heat that made his body drenched in sweat, and the fact that he was out of breath, he stood still. Mouth slightly agape,
eyes swollen, head facing up. He could thank the soft wind that was coming out
of nowhere for being with him at that moment, caressing his buzz-cut hair, while
he was searching
for something beneath that big bright yellow sun,
relentlessly.
When suddenly a yelling voice behind him stated, “You have to stay after dark
if you want to see the stars, Son”, and somehow those lines broke his heart,
because it means that magic only happens at night.
What
an innocent boy he was, for waiting the sun to set its golden shadows so that
he could finally found another sun, without knowing how it worked. He used to
see everything as magic, until hundreds of books were starting to pile up on
the corner of a spacy and slightly messy room of his after pouring him with
intelligence. One thing that he tried to believe in was that one thing that
came out from his father’s mouth, a cliché sentence from a tired father to calm
his distressed innocent son. “Because she burns so fast, just as the same as a
falling star, it’s scary, but at the same time it’s beautiful.” That was the
reason his father’s gave when he asked why, and he wanted to have a faith in it.
Years followed by
another, for him to finally understand the whole idea of outer space and beyond,
to finally become an erudite, only to hear his work mate told him, “Well, now
we have to go far away from the city to observe it.” At that moment, as struck
by a lightning, he realized that the universe seemed to tell him to moving on,
to stop being a masochist, and whispered quietly, “After all, we can’t do
anything but watch.”
*This is an original short story for Themes in Literature class
Reflective Journal
When
I read that the given theme is ‘Reaching For the Star’, I instantly think of it
as reaching for a dream, a career to be precise, but I instantly think of it as
a ‘ugh’, boring kind of interpretation. The fact that I do like outer
space-stuffs and inspiration from one of my favorite song from Slowdive,
entitled ‘When the Sun Hits’ with the lyrics “Sweet thing, I watch you burn so
fast it scares me”, are the reason why I made this short story.
The
story is about a boy who lost his mother, and believing that she becomes a
star. When she died, his father told him to just look up on the sky and look at
the star, because she is one. The boy grew fond of stars and outer space
stuffs, so he decided to educate himself, learned it formally and finally work
in the related field. As time goes by, he knows that his father’s saying is
cliché, but by learning and understanding it deeper, he can always remember his
mother, that’s why I use the word masochist at the end, because he remembers
her in a way that hurts him, but actually likes the way it hurts so just he can
feel alive. After he realized that it’s going to be hard to observe the star, he
told himself to just think of it as a hobby and work, not as a way to hurt
himself even though that feels good (It’s a personal reason, because I myself favorited
angst stories). Finally, at the end he found the reason of his father saying
that his mother is like a falling star, we can do anything but letting go the
people who have died, just like what we can do for a falling star, thus he has
to move on with his life.
The
word Star in ‘reaching for the star’ is something that everyone can interpret
differently, so here I interpreted it both literally and not literally. As you
can see, it’s not quite literally if I say so, because here reaching the ‘Star’
is viewed from the perspective of an astronomer and also one way to remember
his mother. I also want to show that the boy is a common people who lack of
education, but because of his effort and hard work he could finally reach his
dream as an astronomer. Meanwhile, the title ‘As the Sun Hits’ means it hurts
his heart whenever he sees the star. Remembering that people tend to forget
that stars are suns, I put in some events when the son sees the sun and his
father says that you can see it only at night, where it might appeared as
ambiguity, and I think people can interpret the first paragraph differently.
So, throughout the story, we can see that the boy is becoming smarter to know
that the sun is apparently a star, to prove that magic doesn’t only happen at
night. There is also one message that I want to show through this short-story
which is light pollution, because back in the days and in my hometown, we could
still see the stars easily, but here in the middle of light pollution and the
bustling city it’s hard to look at the stars without any help of astronomy
tools, and it’s such a sad truth for people who likes to stargazing like me.
That
is all of the thoughts that I poured into the short-story for this final
assignment. I don’t have the nature to be a writer, so I just gathered all of
my knowledge from classes and books that I have read. Lastly, I’m sorry if the
story or style doesn’t make sense, alongside with grammatical errors, but I’m
having a good time in making this short fiction.
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