A/N: Written back in 2015 for a high school junior English assignment.
The prompt: write an epitaph for one of the characters from The Great Gatsby.
I was born amidst ashes and dust
My mother would brush the dust off our creaky old table
And exhort the presence of God in it and in everything else,
In the laundry washed by her hands that had become mottled before thirty
And in the ash that embedded itself in our pores
In the borrowed suit of the pathetic, stuttering man I married
And in the garage that we lived over
And in the life of being Mrs. George Wilson, the garage man's wife.
But for as long as I can remember
There have been only ashes.
Ashes in our cramped little apartment.
But in the high-class parties that my sister Catherine threw
And in that man I met on the subway
There was neither ashes nor God
Something else I was almost afraid to name.
I thought I had it all
A man who loved me
Who could hurt me but love me so much at the same time
My mother would have said that God was there, keeping him apart from me
In the form of his Catholic wife
And in the stroke of luck that led George to realize that I'd found a man worthy of me
And to lock me in my room, so he could drag me out to some gas station out in the West.
She would have said that it was His work that led me
To run out onto the street
And into that yellow car.
How would Tom feel to know that,
Just as he could break me and put me back together in an instant,
He was the one to shatter me forever?
How would his wife feel?
But as I lay dying
My breast ripped open
God was not there.
Tom was not there.
Daisy was not there.
Only dust and ashes.
There was only ever dust and ashes.