Iliana Moran
Fiction
On August 18th, 2003, I would have been held in your arms. You would’ve smiled at me with so much pride and joy that you wouldn’t have been able to contain yourself. You would have looked at my mom and had the biggest smile on your face, maybe even told her, “This kid is gonna really be something one day.” Can you imagine how you would’ve cheered at the basketball games, the football games, the cross country and track meets, and at the tennis matches even though I wasn’t very good? It crosses my mind a lot that I could have hugged you so many times throughout my twenty years of being on this planet. There’s nights of my life that I wish you could have been at, like my prom, my graduation, and all of the basketball award ceremonies.
Can you imagine how you would’ve cheered at the basketball games, the football games, the cross country and track meets, and at the tennis matches even though I wasn’t very good?
I made up all these fictional stories in my head about going over to your house to watch the NBA playoffs, so I could hear you complain about how the league has gotten soft and that you watched the Chicago Bulls dynasty be made. You’d pull up the Michael Jordan highlights on YouTube and say, “This is what real basketball looks like.” I laughed because of how intense you’d get about it. I even imagined a time that we went to Chicago and you showed me where you grew up. I made up stories about you taking my sisters and me to do random stuff because our parents were working. We’d do whatever we could think of doing, things like playing at a park or going to a movie that only you wanted to see, probably some action movie like The Equalizer. I imagined you being stern at times, but most of the time you were goofing around. You were just like my mom, especially when it came to watching comedies—you guys had the loudest laughs in the room. I imagined you being there to pick me up when I got into arguments with my parents and you’d take me to get food or ice cream, no questions asked. I imagined you being there when my first date picked me up to go to the movies and you’d give him a little bit of a death stare to let him know not to try anything.
I fantasize about these things, and every day I wish they were real. I make up these stories because I feel that in another lifetime, they were all real. The part of you that I imagine the most is how cool it would have been to have you as a grandpa. No matter how old I get, I’ll always make up these stories to keep you alive in my heart.
Iliana Moran is a sophomore at RMC.
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