Short Story to Music Video

I wrote this story based on a music video by Nickelback.

THE MAN THAT CAME BACK
By Tess Nesca 9-7

Life in the country has its ups and downs like everything. It’s beautiful and allows you to see life’s deeper shades, the shades that aren’t always visible. The only downside to this vibrant world is that sometimes those deeper shade are darker then the rest. Often, like many vivid things that come with the land, if you fall upon a dark shade it will hover and follow you forever. Like one years bad crop, that shadow will leave an imprint on your land, your heart, and your life. The people knew that and understood it, although not all accepted it. Perhaps it was for these reasons he left.
No one knows for sure why he left. Some say it was the letter of foreclosure, others say it was his pride. It happened in a time when many left. They packed up their lives, stuffed their souls in old bags and fled. He did not flee though, he was different. He rather slithered away, with his head down in shame and his eyes holding the look of a broken man. Yes, his eyes that had once shined clear blue from the pool of life had then looked like a shattered surface broken by a stone. That stone, with a single throw, had broken his soul in a million pieces. He did not leave with hope of a better tomorrow, no, he just left.
What of his family though? What of his son left without a fathers guidance and his wife without a husbands support. Of course, they made it through. Everyone can make it through, just grit their teeth and pass. But how were they to live? I mean really live. How were they to live with sustenance and happiness, to live whole? His broken family couldn’t. They weren’t capable of just picking up the pieces and moving on. They had too many memories, too many photos on the wall.
His wife worked night and day to be everything he wasn’t and his son faded away. His son sat and watched the children playing from a very different world and he heard the fathers laugh from his strange fatherless world. Together his family tried, they really did, but they couldn’t move forwards through the tatters of an empty past. They just couldn’t reach the present for they lived with a ghost among them. The presence they conjured up to fill the spot left empty. They had everything but him.
The problem with the past is that it never stays the same. It wanders and it twists, memories blur and fade around the edges, and emotion goes up in smoke. With these changes as all to guide him, his son grew from a sad boy to an angry man. Angry people in turn grow blind and so did his son. Without a backward glance he fled away from time, away from memories, and away from home and hurt. He ran hand in hand with his runaway father and with nothing but thoughts of him he crashed.
For every negative there is a positive and that I tell you honestly. So, as tragedy struck it did what it often does, and pulled them all together.
Now, no one knows for certain why he’d left. Some say it was the letter of foreclosure, others say it was his pride. In the end though, we all knew why he’d come back, for he came back a regretful man and a loving father. He came back to the family that needed him.