The Wrong View

There are some stories that are usually interpreted the way they are meant to be. Then there are some that are usually read the completely the wrong way, such as the love story in The Things They Carried. Then there are the stories that most people read right while a small part of the population see some kind of horror within it. So it is for my story.
My grandmother died within the past year. It was in her sleep, so it was peaceful. In most ways, this is the best way to go that some people can ask for. Of course, I was the one who freaked out. Just an hour before, someone had checked in on her and she was sleeping. An hour later and she’s dead.

The idea that she was alive a mere hour before she died had a sense of horror for me. It wasn’t because it was terrible. It was the sense of “what if?” that I found myself associating with the moment. What happened if they had woken her up instead of letting her sleep in? Would she still be alive? Would that have been better? Or would something worse play out afterwards?
I can see the peace in the story now. It doesn’t make everything rose colored about the situation, but it is enough. But through this I can sympathize with O’Brien and his difficultly with getting the story across as a love story. While my story is the exact opposite, there is the common theme that a story is being misinterpreted from the original purpose. The person on the other side of the story is getting some completely different experience. This in itself is a double edge sword. Sometimes authors want their pieces to have the ability to adapt to their reader. But sometimes the story is meant to be seen in one light to be understood to the fullest effects. It is a restriction of how the reader can see the story, but there is a legitimate reason for that.

The love story is something that people look at as a war story mainly because the focus is on the baby buffalo that suffers in the end. It is the thing that draws away a reader’s attention. My attention was taken to the one moment that could have changed the way things played out. It then just became a matter of following through with the thoughts.

I don’t particularly enjoy the thoughts sometimes. But it is the way that I see things play out. At this point, I have accepted all that had happened. It is not so much of a horror story than a different path. However, that is after the fact. That was when we were told it was a love story.