Looking Forward
Someone can never completely let go of their past. In the short stories, “Death by Landscape,” by Margaret Atwood and “Blue Against White,” by Jeannette C. Armstrong, both of the characters struggle to leave behind their pasts to find a future in different ways. One because of past lingering guilt that never received proper closure, and the other for fear of not belonging.
In “Death by Landscape,” the protagonist, Lois, remembers her childhood camp where her closest friend - Lucy - vanished many years ago. The fact that Lois is never found torments Lois even after a great deal of time has passed. Because of this Lois struggles to ever let go and live in the future, when she reflects, “She can hardly remember, now, having her two boys in the hospital, nursing them as babies; she can hardly remember getting married, or what Rob looked like. Even at the time she was paying full attention” (Atwood 7). This describes through her memories of life after
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Reflecting on her childhood memories as she walks to her childhood home, “She realized she had kept that door in her mind all the years she had been away. It had been there as always, a bright blue against the white” (Armstrong 92). Lena, though she did not like living at her childhood home at the time, has come to miss it after feeling so trapped and lost in the city. Similar to the coyote that she thinks of that accidentally got trapped in a building, jumping to its death instead of going back to the elevator, because Lena knows that coyotes always remember their way back. (Armstrong 95.) Lena feels pity and empathy for the coyote’s trapped situation. While struggling with finding a future, Lena travels back home to reunite with her past in order to find a future. Lena is feeling something many Indigenous people feel; estrangement from both the reserve and the