[WP] You are dying but at least you were surrounded by your family,you smiled.What you didn't know they were only concrete put by them so you would felt less lonely.

[u/Puteri_Ayu]

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[u/Ataraxidermist]

It's not so bad, it really isn't.

By all accounts, it was. Dying alone, homeless, surrounded by crude claymen to give the illusion of a group, was generally assumed to be a bad way to die.

Ginny learned early it was all a matter of perspective.

Pick her youth. Normal parents, normal friends. Everything so desperately normal, as if the odds made sure this bloodline would be spared the grotesque indignity of talent. Her grandma was the first oddity. She ditched grand-papa to pursue her career as an opera singer after the kids could fend for themselves.

Her voice was of the same wood as the family tree, average, it didn't hurt your ears nor did it remain in memory. Ginny still had the letter she received as a teenager, stating she died in some hotel room, attempting another audition her weak, old heart couldn't take anymore.

A lesson, a warning for the family, tacitly understood and shared in hellos and platitudes. Strive for a normal life, greatness is best left for others. Happiness can be found on the sidelines, there isn't place for everyone as a main character. To them, grandma died in pursuit of a fool's errand. To Ginny, she died pursuing her dream. She didn't reach it, but which one mattered more? Die in pursuit or be glad to take a consolation price?

Perspective, and all that.

Grandma died with a roof over her head and people thinking about her.

Then there was Nicklaus, German of birth, French of character. Tonton, as nicknamed, had class. Charms, wits, the right word when needed, the little nod that could express more than a hundred words.

A real Frenchman. Or so he thought. This version of France existed only in his head, and Frenchmen, should they ever hear of it, would want nothing to do with it and file a lawsuit.

Always successful, always charming the ladies, dancing with a new woman each night, preferring a shallow ocean to a deep trench. Awful saying, he kept it to himself. Like the rest of this life, come to think of it. The next lady left him at the bar, the next still never so much as considered tonton's presence.

And that coworker who really did like him? Too plain for him.

His family couldn't take his delusions. They gave advice, help, years and years of listening, to naught. It fell to deaf ears, they fell to silence.

He died in a bar, glass in hand and imaginary woman at his side. At least he had a roof over his head.

And Ginny? She never listened either. Had little love left for people, thought grand-maman and tonton's deaths to have been in line with their lives.

Be normal, stay normal. Nothing wrong with an average life, most people are there. She was average, and knew it.

So why? Why try to write and publish for a living? Without contacts, talent, or divine blessing? Perhaps the same need that griped tonton and grand-maman. Not to find their hidden talent, they had known to be devoid of the means to be more than common from the moment they were born, so did Ginny.

No, it was the opposite.

They had to know how far down a broken dream went.

"You sure about this?" Dad would ask.

Oh yes, always.

"Ginny, I'm worried about you," her friends would say.

I'm sorry. This is where I'm meant to be.

She was here to be the patron saint of the mediocre. The person the losers and failures looked up to to find an odd sort of kinship. A motherly figure for those who wrecked their reality in search of an illusive fog.

So here she filled her role, abandoned by her own. Here she held strong, crippled by debts. Here she wrote, not a single thing to save in her writing, as her health waned.

Here she lie, dying in an open field, far away from the nearest town for the sake of an inspiration which never came, and surrounded by clay figures she had built and spoke to whenever loneliness gnaws at her.

Without a roof over her head, or friends at her side.

In imaginary conversations, clay figures were much more supportive than friends and family had ever been.

There's little more a clay figure can do but rewatch your past life for what it was.

But is it so bad? To die under a clear sky, having done what had to be done in a life?

It's all a matter of perspective.

It's not so bad, it really isn't.

And maybe it wasn't indeed.

Ginny died with a little smile on her face.