I am a writer. I write sentences and paragraphs and one time, I wrote a book.
My first book was my proudest moment. A tearjerker. The main character dies in the end. She hates herself, falls in love, loves her life and hates herself a little less, but she dies.
Maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe characters like her were meant to be written. Maybe characters like her were meant to die.
It wasn’t my first book ever, but it was the first one I completed. The first one that I could give a true finale to. I fear that ever since that day, that day I marked it as complete, I’ll never be able to do it again. I’ll never love a character half as much. I’ll never be able to sit for hours on end typing up a projection of my self’s dramatized thoughts and adoration speckled ramblings. I’ll never interlace my poetry about how sad I used to be into my original work ever again.
I stopped writing, sort of, when I did it. I killed her, I gave her a funeral, a memorial. I gave her an epilogue and I put a lock and key on the 1200 pages worth of words about a world which only exists in the darkest corners of my mind.
Something in me clicked that day. Our greatest masterpieces are the ones we don’t plan. I wrote my first book blindly. It was a stunning mess. Typos and plot holes. Flawed characters. Geographical errors. Health code violations and travel regulations ignored.
Pack a gun in the carry on. Chop off a middle finger or two. Crash your car into another one. Drink syrupy sodas that clog your arteries and actually die. How comical. How tragic.
Why did I kill her? Why did I kill the manifestation of myself that I adored? Why did I let her whole family watch helplessly as she did what I would’ve done for the people I love? Why’d I let her sacrifice herself in the name of love? Because she was me, and I know her like nobody else does.
I know she was a character who wasn’t meant to make it to the last page as anything past a memory or a metaphor. I knew she was sacrificial in nature and the only way for her to have her hero’s journey was to die in fear of death.
I was never afraid of dying. I thought it was simple. One day you’re here, and the next day you’re not. When you die, it’s not really your problem anymore. You’re gone. You cease to exist. You’re not a spirit looking above your corpse and watching men in scrubs take your naked body to be burnt to ashes. You’re not a star a trillion light years away. You don’t make pendulums swing, or ouija boards spell out words of malice and disdain. You don’t walk through people to send a chill down their spine. You don’t sit at your headstone and watch as your mother places fresh daffodils at your grave twice a week.
Mostly because you think white daffodils with yellow centers look too much like a fried egg, but there’s the fact that you accepted the finality of death too. That once you die there’s nothing left. You don’t even exist in the blackness of it all. You just… you were, and now… now you aren’t.
I think there’s something gorgeous about it. I think it’s a mesmerizing and daunting reality. Sure, heaven seems fun, but doesn’t it give you this false pretense of life? Like, what if I die and that’s it? What if there’s nothing left? What if I am dying and I think I’m getting a continuation to my life in some way, shape, or form, and then I don’t? I mean, I’d never know, but imagine all that pent up hope you’d lose at the same rate your heartbeat declines. I think it’s particularly beautiful to know that this life is all we have.
But I think I killed her as punishment. For being self loathing. For not taking care of herself. For having real love, but not wanting to live for it until she had gotten romantic love. For valuing herself so little. For being so reckless. For lying to others. To herself. For not handling things properly. I punished her for the worst things in me that I gave her. I killed her because she didn’t deserve it anymore.
I killed her because she got everything I wanted, and just like I always do, I got selfish. I got jealous. I destroyed her. I killed her.
She brought me to life. I killed her. She resurrected me. I made her crash her car gallantly in front of everyone she loved and I killed her with my bare hands.
I killed her to punish myself.
I miss her a lot.
I miss myself too.
Written April 2022.