Tag: life

musician

Stranger Things Broke my Heart in the Best Way

Kelly Rogers

Stranger Things took me on an adventure with my children back to my childhood and then broke my heart in the best way with a beautiful, flawed goodbye. The tender years of my kids aligned with the children on the show. We faced changing friendships, first loves, and grief with the show’s characters, 1980s old style…no mobile phones and devices, no socials, and a worldview limited to a D&D campaign.

While the plot was sometimes messy and the connections were dizzying, the show never failed as a time machine and stayed true to the characters even in the darkest, most confusing moments. My kids and I had our favorites, with Derek as a late entry pulling on our heartstrings and inspiring humor in what had been a humorless year IRL. My kids grew up on this show, and I was okay with that. Fortitude and heroics in the service of friendship and love are life’s greatest lessons. Loyalty is another one. You don’t leave your people behind, and mothers are bad a$$es when pushed to their limits. I grew with the show, too.

It was the right time for the story to end, but with it, so did the portal it provided to my youth and that of my kids. And this is where I find myself heartbroken. Writers of shows and books get to create portals to other places, times, and lives. This is a power. I am grateful to the Duffer brothers for allowing me to share this story and my childhood with my kids. Maybe I have the power, too, to preserve memories of that time, or maybe I can make new worlds and portals equally compelling. It’s the end of this story, but there are always stories to tell that shift perceptions, make you fall in love (or hate) with characters, and potentially change your life. Stranger Things was never perfect, but it was powerful in all the right ways. It’s never goodbye when characters and stories find their way into your heart.

poetry, story, writer, writing

6-hour

Kelly Rogers

What if there was only a 6-hour workday?

What would I do with the two wild, precious hours returned to me?

I channel my inner Mary Oliver, memorized, internalized from the dog-eared copy by my bed.

I make plans for those 10 hours, visions, missions swirling in my mind.

My Apple Watch chirps, reminding me those hours are fictitious, aspirational.

What if there was only a 6-hour workday? What would I do?

It’s not that deep. Dinner would be earlier. Evening walks would be more frequent. I’d see my people and dogs more.

poetry, writer, writing

A-I

Kelly Rogers

A robot in I

Or am I the robot, artificial in the real world?

My motherboard is fried, but I function in a commotion of digital thought

Are my thoughts just machine learning to my nurture versus nature self?

My juxtaposition, binary

We will become a singularity, all of us collapsing into a mainframe

What happened to the joy of simple, disconnected things?

Our processing is faulty, dirty data corrupted by time

Our only intelligence now wired, controlling what once we controlled.

fiction, story, writer, writing

Starting a New Story

Kelly Rogers

I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my first flight in a year. A few days ago, I went to purchase new luggage, and something magical happened, or at least it did to my eyes. Inspiration and magic are everywhere you turn. You just need the gift of sight.

And it begins….

I couldn’t understand why I was the only one who could see she was different. Maybe different is not the best word to use. When you are at Weatherby’s Rack, the discount version of my favorite store I can’t afford, normal is normal, and anything not normal, is different. Claire, if her tag was not a ruse, was falling off the scale on the different end for she had elven ears and ancient runes tattooed on her face.

poetry, writer, writing

The Empty Seat

Kelly Rogers

I wasn’t prepared for the empty seat at the table. He filled it so dutifully, yet quietly, each meal we shared.

This was the special occasion table, the linen-and-real-plates table. It barely fit our nuclear family of five, but somehow it detonated to fit our husbands and children.

He occupied the seat at one head of the table, across from my mom at the other end for a balanced table. The rest of us scurried to grab the spaces in-between, the youngest in high chairs like jesters off to the side.

This table was solid wood, built for joy. There was the occasional skirmish around it. We mostly broke bread and blew out candles here.

Cancer tried to take it away.

COVID tried to take it away.

The disagreements all families have tried to take it away.

We always came back though, and he sat in that same spot, asking his grandchildren and sons-in-law for extra ice cream and cheesecake, a procurement specialist for the good things in life.

This was the only throne he ever wanted. He was head of state in this fatherland. He will always fill that seat.