"Ashes" by David Sedaris
Medium Prompt

One family story that I will hold onto forever is the story of my cousin Natasha, or Tasha as we all called her. Her father (my father's brother) got a divorce with her mother, and my uncle stayed in New Jersey. Unfortunately, Tasha and her mother moved to Florida. The distance has limited our time together severely for as long as I can remember. In fact, there are very few moments of Tasha I can remember. But those moments that stay with me, every single detail is still completely clear and vivid in my mind.

I remember spending one Christmas season together at my aunt's house when we were in our early years of elementary school. Our fathers were teasing us by saying that if we fell asleep during the midnight mass at church, we just might find coal in our stockings. We would also play at our grandparents' house, making flowers out of clay and watching "Gone With the Wind", even though we could never actually follow the storyline. I recall exploring my dad's old room, and looking through his high school papers. I remember playing with our grandpa’s bird Tweety and eating strawberry frosted donuts, our favorite.


When I was in fifth grade and she in sixth, our uncle took us out fishing. That day, I caught what I thought was a massive fish, but was actually a tire. We laughed for hours. I remember afterwards going to our aunt's house. To escape the cold, we dove straight into the heated pool and swam for over two hours. When it was too dark, we went inside and watched movies while eating popcorn, chips, cake, and ice cream sandwiches. We stayed up all night talking.

She came back to New Jersey again two years later when I was in the seventh grade. That year, she met my best friend Gaby. She also met my karaoke machine. The three of us spent days just singing our hearts out to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. We even came up with our own talk show. Tasha was afraid of clowns, so at night, Gaby and I would place a toy clown right by her face so she had a lovely surprise when she awoke. We would go shopping together. We would watch movies until 1:00 a.m., and then we would spend the rest of the night talking about girly things. There was nothing wrong when I was with Tasha and Gaby. We all got along so well and enjoyed every single moment together.

Then after her visit in the seventh grade, Tasha and I lost touch. She went back to Florida and began high school. She got a job, a boyfriend, and a social life that no longer involved me. It wasn’t her fault – how could I be involved with her social life when we were so far apart? And now that she is in college and I am in my senior year, I still have not seen her since the seventh grade. Looking back, my memories with Tasha still make me smile. I will never forget sitting on a dock by the lake at night eating apple pie with her. I will never forget telling scary stories at midnight. And I certainly will never forget our coordinated dance to Mandy Moore’s hit song “Candy”. But unfortunately, things have changed. The story of Tasha and I does not have a happy ending.

If I was to pick a medium to tell my story in, I would tell it with pictures and videos. Only pictures and video clips could truly capture the fun we had. Just one look at our faces in the photos would show the audience just how much we enjoyed each other’s company. I would show pictures of us singing karaoke, or creating our own talk show. I would include photos of us as younger children eating those strawberry frosted donuts while watching Gone With the Wind with our grandma. And I would add the video we recorded of our coordinated dance to “Candy”. In this case, words are just not enough to describe the times I had with Tasha, and the memories I keep.