Challenge #116 - Write About Your Father
I found something of my father's the other day. It's a journal; his personal journal. I found it in the top drawer of his bedside table in the master bedroom while we were exploring the Hermitage. And when I read it for the first time, it felt like I was truly getting to know Franz Hopper, the man who was my father.
It wasn't surprising to see that Daddy wrote about Mom a lot in his journal. She'd passed away of a brain aneurysm when I was five or six; just fell asleep in the armchair while listening to Daddy teaching me to play the piano and never woke up.
He missed her terribly. Some entries were written as letters to Mom, telling her about various milestones I had reached or just saying how much he loved her and missed her and wished that we all could be together again.
Lyoko and XANA were only mentioned in passing in Daddy's journal, which made sense. All of the technical and historical information about both was in the video diaries that Jeremie had found. Instead Daddy wrote about his suspcions that the French government was watching him, spying on him. It bothered me that I could recognize his increasing paranoia the further on I read, especially after I noticed that several entries had the same date - the one day that Daddy kept reliving thanks to the "return to the past" program.
Sometimes I wonder where my father is now. We're not completely sure that he's still on Lyoko, although Yumi and the others remain optimistic to keep my hopes up. He may have died in order to save me and Lyoko after XANA escaped. Or Daddy somehow could have been brought out of Lyoko and back into the real world with XANA, and is still XANA's prisoner. God only knows what his mental state is now, considering he wasn't that stable when we were first virtualized onto Lyoko.
Jeremie doesn't know that I have Daddy's journal, and I'm not going to tell him for a while. If he knew it existed, he'd tear through it searching for something that could help us against XANA. And it's not the fact that there's nothing in the journal that would help that I want to keep it away from Jeremie.
I just want to hold onto this one piece of Daddy that I have for as long as I can.
It wasn't surprising to see that Daddy wrote about Mom a lot in his journal. She'd passed away of a brain aneurysm when I was five or six; just fell asleep in the armchair while listening to Daddy teaching me to play the piano and never woke up.
He missed her terribly. Some entries were written as letters to Mom, telling her about various milestones I had reached or just saying how much he loved her and missed her and wished that we all could be together again.
Lyoko and XANA were only mentioned in passing in Daddy's journal, which made sense. All of the technical and historical information about both was in the video diaries that Jeremie had found. Instead Daddy wrote about his suspcions that the French government was watching him, spying on him. It bothered me that I could recognize his increasing paranoia the further on I read, especially after I noticed that several entries had the same date - the one day that Daddy kept reliving thanks to the "return to the past" program.
Sometimes I wonder where my father is now. We're not completely sure that he's still on Lyoko, although Yumi and the others remain optimistic to keep my hopes up. He may have died in order to save me and Lyoko after XANA escaped. Or Daddy somehow could have been brought out of Lyoko and back into the real world with XANA, and is still XANA's prisoner. God only knows what his mental state is now, considering he wasn't that stable when we were first virtualized onto Lyoko.
Jeremie doesn't know that I have Daddy's journal, and I'm not going to tell him for a while. If he knew it existed, he'd tear through it searching for something that could help us against XANA. And it's not the fact that there's nothing in the journal that would help that I want to keep it away from Jeremie.
I just want to hold onto this one piece of Daddy that I have for as long as I can.