‘Tis the season of transition. High school students are graduating and moving on to the next phases of their lives. My MFA students are doing the same. Friends are moving, some of them to distant places. Yesterday, Cathy and I hosted a “See You Later” party for one such friend. It’s a sad occasion for those of us who love him, but it’s a happy one as well because now he and his partner will be in the same place instead of continuing a long-distance relationship.

This all has me thinking of the “see you laters” we say and how sometimes those “laters” never come. I said, “I’ll see you later,” to my father one hot July day in 1982, but I never again saw him alive. I told hm not to work too hard, and then two weeks later his heart gave out while mowing the yard. I’ve said, “I’ll see you later to friends over the years, and for one reason or another, our paths never again crossed. Some of the last times I saw someone still haunt me.

So, let’s make this week’s post short and, I hope, productive. We’ll call this prompt, “The Last Time.” See if you can think of someone and the last time you saw them. Why does that last time stand out in your memory? Was there something about your relationship that was unresolved? Was there something you wish you’d done or said? If you had the chance to see this person again, what would you say? You might even begin a direct address to this person with the words, “I wish. . . .” You can fill in the blank however you like. We often enter our material from a position of regret. This strategy often becomes a useful one in creative nonfiction. For an example, please see Brenda Miller’s flash piece, “Swerve.”

https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/swerve/

What someone is sorry for or what they regret can also invite us to deepen character and to move plot along in a piece of fiction. What a character regrets can also be a way of fictionalizing our own personal remorse as we pretend it belongs to someone else.

I hope you’ll give this writing strategy a try. Sometimes writers have a tendency to run away from regret. I hope, though, if you face it, either in creative nonfiction or fiction, you’ll be able to fully explore the complicated and contradictory feelings that often accompany our guilt or shame.