It was a very sudden inspiration that passed into me. As you may have guessed, it is a tribute to the late Michael Jackson—I refer to him through a similar character.
Important: Honestly, this shouldn't be a fanfic. But I wanted post this somewhere—not for reviews, not for anything at all. In fact, I don't think it's too good. It's just that...this is what happened, and I simply knew no other way to express it.
My father has always been a fan of MJ. And I really found his random singing irritating. And these days, he's always singing MJ songs, over and over—and it hurts. I can see it so deeply. He misses his idol. It's simply—ah. I had to write it down.
RIP, Michael Jackson. You moved my father with your talent. You are a great man, in the eyes of the world—and you will always be.
Everlasting Song
My father sang his songs all the time. He sang them when he was training us in the L Forests, annoyingly catchy little tunes that I had memorised long ago. He sang them when he was accompanying me to the vendor on the other side of the road. He often knew only four lines, but he would repeat those four lines over and over again, anyway.
How it had annoyed me, the way he sang those wild tunes to the death! They became no more than grating noise to my ears. Melodies and lyrics of a master, words speaking of a better world, of hope, of change.
It was that song, Dad often said, that had brought him to the heights he now stood at. It was this song, a classic by a superstar, that had kept him looking to tomorrow. It had been such a huge part of his life.
My father was a die-hard fan; it wasn't hard to tell. It was people like these who made all the singer's concerts sell out—people who broke into his songs at the slightest prompting. The fever was burning in Dad's eyes, every time he saw a new ad on the Kerning notice board. He even had a whole shelve of his albums. Not one of us in the family had ever understood this obsession.
Yet it was obvious that this aging star wouldn't last long. He was already on heavy medication, his youthful strength long faded with his age and health.
His successes became less and less frequent, and in no time he was refunding tickets to every other concert.
Slowly, the passion was dying. His songs remained imprinted in memories, but his image quickly darkened. Soon, even Dad wasn't buying his tickets anymore.
"I don't know what's happened to him," he muttered to us once or twice, as he observed his CD collection. He finally returned to proper life, his obsession gone; he trained us with new seriousness and focus, though he still did hum a tune once in a while.
But in the end, it was only a matter of time. It made the headlines all over Victoria Island, when its greatest star, a legend of the times, finally succumbed to stress and exhaustion, succumbed to the pressure of the world, and silenced his voice forever—
That day, I saw a single headline drain all the life from Dad's eyes.
It was just three days ago. Have I ever seen my father cry? Have I ever cared about this singer I only vaguely know? No, I don't think so.
Last Friday was the first time.
To us, a great singer has passed away. To Dad, the world has lost an icon, an inspiration, a godly man whose songs were legendary.
I know I used to find Dad's singing and humming utterly irksome. They bothered me, to no end, those songs that he endlessly belted out. But now, here he sits with his dagger in his lap, cloth in his right hand, singing the same four lines over and over again, like a broken record—words of a brighter future, of a beautiful world, of healing and of truth.
Never before have such words been so heart-wrenching.
Peering from beyond the staircase, I swallow so the pain dissipates, pain from watching an aging man cradle his fallen dreams. I sing one line with him, silently—words that I memorised long ago.
Updates, by the way. My recently-deleted Song of the Sea will be reposted, with about 2k words cut, and the storyline almost completely changed.