a reddit post i made in 2020

hi.

i found this at 3am while scrubbing my old reddit account clean on a whim and decided to archive it here. its poorly written and not really much of a story. but i don't care because it meant something to 2020 me, and it still means something to me now.

so, here it is, unedited.

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i know no ones gonna see this. but here are some things i learned about my grandad today

my grandad died before i was born. he was an avid smoker, and died of lung cancer because of this. i never met him. most of the things written here i already knew, but i didnt dare to interrupt my mom while she said them.

it was late when i woke up, but i made no effort to stand from where i was on my bed. my mom came into my room and raised the blinds. she looked at the unfinished drawing on my desk, and told my dad, who also came in to see it as well. it wasn't impressive. im not the best artist. my dad said "theres the artist your dad wanted". and my mom, nostalgic as ever, starts to tell me about him.

he was studying odontology before dropping out and becoming a professor. since his parents didn't want to pay for those studies he abandoned, he started to sell books.

he was good with languages and loved literature. he knew french, english and german. he wrote a lot of stories, some of which were transcribed into a blog my aunt made. he often took his students on field trips to a nearby river. when he retired, he joined a theatre club. he always told anecdotes to my mother and her siblings.

what really motivated me to tell this whole thing to random people on the internet though, was what my mom said next.

"he always wanted us to be creative. artists. he would be proud of you."

i think

i want him to be proud of me.

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i still want him to be proud of me.