CNF Writing Exercise: Exercise on Rhetorical Techniques

There’s something bittersweet about that old armchair kept away in our bodega.

It’s gathering dust now, in that room. Before it found its place there, it served its purpose for years as the chair for our PC setup in my father’s room. Sweet, sweet memories — I used to sit there all day, playing games on the PC, scrolling through Facebook. I’d sit back against that armchair with my dog next to me with how big the seat was, thinking of all the online friends I’d gathered at some point. I was hugging myself on that chair, in the dark, when I first found out, in my own little naïve way, how cherishing someone was like.

Bitter. Memories of me standing at the end of the hallway, my yaya trying to drag me away from the commotion of a bunch of strangers carrying the armchair out of the room for the purpose of loading it onto the trunk of a pickup truck outside. My dad was yelling for them to be careful, for who sat on the chair, being carried in the air, was my sickly mother. A look of pain across her features. Bitter, for I did not understand it back then and only thought: she’s on a throne, and she almost looks like a queen. Bitter, for I did not know back then, that it was the last time I’d see her.