Endings Into Beginnings

Our local newspaper office (as well as most newspapers, I would imagine) sell "end rolls"- for $1, we can walk into their looming marble offices downtown, and request a huge roll of leftover blank newspaper. My parents managed to keep a roll around the house for my siblings and I most of the time, and we'd spend long afternoons scribbling away. I have a lot of sweet memories of those moments, so a few days before Sky left, I asked him to pick one up for Millie.

I've always had a kind of wistfulness pierce my heart every time we drive by the building. I feel like if I wasn't staying home with Millie, that's the place I'm meant to be. I've felt that way since I was younger, so scrawling pictures or poetry on something that had the potential to be news excited me. It seems Millie unknowingly felt the same.

We spread it out on the cold tile floor, and she would intermittently draw and ask me to make pictures- always requesting the moon first, then stars, and once in a while, our names. Then she would dance on the paper to hear it crinkle beneath her bare feet, and sink down to the floor again with new inspiration with a new crayon.

I'll never know what stories would have been printed onto those pages and thrown carelessly on a doorstep in the early morning hours. There would probably be some articles filled with sadness as so much news is, some filled with announcements, and some with information for our town. And maybe my name isn't meant to be printed on the byline with them.

But Millie is writing her own stories, new and full of hope. And her stories are always the best.