A novel, perhaps.

The leaves are falling again. Daphne’s tears that fall because she knows she cannot love hi, the sun god, the way that he needs. Every year, Apollo comes and crowns himself in her boughs, and every year Daphne weeps unnoticed.

“All things gold cannot stay,” Mother whispers into my ear. We survey our new lodgings, two rooms at a bed and breakfast right on the sea. “We can polish our lives to a shine, hold them to the light, but it will leave eventually.”

         I do not respond; it sounds too much like an excuse to me. Why did he give up on us? Was the polish not working, the golden liquid more luminous than the life you made?
         You would scoff at the accommodations we have found ourselves in, at the new golden lives we are not forced to live.

          “Your mother doing labor? You, my princess, sleeping in a rented bed? No art studio, extra closet, city sounds to serenade you to sleep? How will you ever survive?”

          You talked in beautiful tones, Jack, when you were sober enough to think. A teacher and an artist, you were always foremost an orator, if such a profession still existed. I choose this hole in the wall over any cheap apartment you have stumbled into in Hell’s kitchen. Your own private Hell.