What You Started

   I stared at the blank word document. As much as I wanted the words to materialize on the page, so elegantly as they had before, they wouldn’t. The only difference between then and now was the fact that it now had to be my words.

   My emotions fluctuated from panicked, to angry, backed to panicked, then finally to disappointed. “I’m a fraud,” I said aloud, not intending to.

   “No you’re not,” my dear wife insisted. She was comfortably spread out on the couch behind me, scrolling through her phone. I could hear in her voice that she was struggling to decide whether or not it was worth staying awake with me. She had been sweet and offered to stay up with me, even though she struggled to stay up past one in the morning.

   “I am,” I insisted, letting my face sink into my hands.

   “You just have writer’s block. It happens to everyone.”

   “Not like this.”

   She let out a mildly-irritated sigh. “It’ll be alright, honey. You wrote, Childish, in the bathroom at a bar and now it’s one of your most famous poems! Inspiration comes at weird times. You’ll be okay. Maybe you just need to go to bed?”

   I just shook my head. I had dug myself into a pit that I had no hope of getting out of.

   There was a moment of silence before she asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

   “No,” I mumbled.

   I heard her get up and make her way over to me. She rested her hand on my shoulder and kissed the top of my head. “Well then, I think I’ll head to bed. I don’t get how you can stay up so late. I’ll see you in the morning.”

   “Goodnight,” I muttered. 

   She walked away, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the still empty word document.

   In the darkness of the living room, I felt soul-crushingly alone. I could have sworn the eyes of my ‘muse’ were watching me. What if he was there?

   I turned around, praying it would be just me in the room. I was completely alone. For a moment, relief washed through me. Unease quickly took its place. Somehow, nothing being there was worse than if someone was there.

   I looked back at the computer. The blinking line, ready to cement my words seemed to be taunting me. For what felt like the millionth time, I indented the first line, only to immediately delete it.

   Pressure came from behind me. It was as if someone was leaning against my back, staring over my shoulder. Their invisible eyes mocked my empty document.

   To distract myself, I pulled up some old works. My brain trying to justify that reading them for the millionth time would give me sudden inspiration.

   As soon as I pulled it up, my eyes went to the author's name. Drew Rawling. Even that was stolen.

   I never intended to steal any of it. However, I was six years down a road of lies and deceit. It left me trying to defend my actions to no one but myself. All of it was in vain.

   The voice of my ‘muse’ mixed with the steady hum of the air conditioner, shaming me for my actions. You were always so selfish. You knew what you were doing.

   I knew they were right, yet my brain fired back rehearsed arguments. It wasn’t my fault that Drew had died. It wasn’t my fault that I wanted to publish his poems as he had always planned. It wasn’t my fault that people mistook them for my work. It wasn’t my fault.

   The two of us had been friends since we were little. I knew Drew better than anyone! If anything proved it, it was that I knew about their persona, Drew Rawling. To the rest of the world, he was Nicholas.

   Drew wrote thought-provoking and elegant pieces of poetry. You could read the same piece over and over and discover a million different meanings to it. Each word flowed perfectly into the next like the tumbling waters of a river. It was as if the heavens themselves wrote it.

   Nicholas did not write poetry. He might have read a few poems, but never put his thoughts into metaphors or used symbolism to describe his emotions.

   All I wanted to do was share that with the world…

   Drew had written enough to make a full career off of it - a career that I had taken. But demand is a fickle mistress who doesn’t take no for an answer. I had burned through all of his works within less than a decade. Every little bit of work I could use, I already had.

   The last poem I had put out was an unfinished piece that was no more than three lines. It was one I had spent hours looking through old notebooks for. Even though it had been a spur-of-the-moment piece he never went back to, it held just as much meaning as every other. How someone could write something so perfect, so effortlessly, baffled me.

   I closed the poem I’d pulled up and came face to face once again with the blank page. It continued to taunt me. Being beaten by something as small as a blank document killed me inside.

   My hands hovered over the keyboard. Once again, I indented the first line, only to delete it less than a second later.

   All the fear and frustration in my chest bubbled up and turned into anger. My skin felt hot from rage. The pressure against my back increased.

   Why should I have felt ashamed? Drew might have written it, but I had put in the hours and days of work finding the voice that went with the words perfectly. I had analyzed each line until it was so engraved in my mind that I couldn’t get it out if I tried. I had grown the character of Drew Rawling into someone who embodied the story of success through struggle. I had put in just as much work as he had.

   Every time I put on that persona, I felt accomplished. I felt useful after so many years of feeling useless. It was an incredible and liberating feeling.

   The night Drew took his own life, he knew he would be leaving behind incredible works of art. Was it so wrong of me to want to share that with the world when he had been planning to do so? Was it so wrong to keep the name of Drew Rawling alive?

   I slammed the laptop lid shut and spun the chair around. Without the glow from the blank document, I was left in the dark. The only light came from the few beams from the street lamp outside that snuck past the blinds.

   My tired brain contorted the patches of light into a distorted face. It watched me. The empty eyes bore into my soul. As clear as day, I heard Drew’s voice.

   “Why?” He asked.

   “I wanted to do you justice.” I felt like it was the only right answer. “I finished what you started.”

   The distorted face stared blankly back at me.

   “I wouldn’t have to if you had stuck around. I wanted to help you, but you never accepted it,” I grumbled. “I did this for you.”

   I swiveled back around and grabbed my tea. When I had first opened the still-blank document, it had been too hot to drink. Now, it was cold and bitter; an accurate reflection of how I felt.

   I continued to sit in the dark, stewing in a mixture of pity and frustration. The pressure came back to mock me. Instead of just leaning against my back, it poked and prodded at my arms and tugged at the blanket I had wrapped around my shoulders. I felt like a toy it was boredly played with.

   My frustration began to grow to the point where I could feel it lodged in my throat. Anger dripped from it, collecting in a spot in my chest. Tendrils of rage lashed out, raking against my ribcage. My skin grew hot as it seeped into my veins. It infected my mind, turning my vision red.

   My hands longed for something to destroy. Something to tear, shred, strangle, crush...

   The longer I sat there, the more it built up.

   When it finally boiled up, I jumped up and clawed at the air behind me. My chair crashed to the ground. Once again, I stood face to face with nothing.

   All the fury I felt began to turn into a feeling of nothingness. My limbs grew tired and heavy. It felt like I had been hollowed like a pumpkin on Halloween. I was a cheap gimmick that was destined for the trash. The only part of me that remained was the useless shell.

   The door across the room from me opened and my wife stepped out. “Is everything alright?” She asked, still half asleep.

   “Yeah,” I muttered, picking up the chair. “Something just spooked me.”

   She mumbled, “Okay,” under her breath before going back to bed.

   I stared at the door for a moment before turning around and opening the laptop. My eyes went straight to the time. It was almost dawn.

   I stood up straight and tried to rub the tired out of my face to no avail. I opened my eyes and leaned down to close my laptop, but stopped. The document was no longer blank.

   My heart dropped as I stared at the words that faced me.

   The dead cannot be blamed for the actions of the living.

   I looked back over my shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever wrote it. Fear clenched at my windpipe and restricted my breathing. I could hear the rapid thudding of my heart in my ears.

   But everything was the same as it had been seconds earlier.

   I looked back at the screen to find more writing.

   This was of your design.

   In the time it took for me to blink, another line appeared.

   Where do you go from here?

   It hurt having the question that had haunted me all night thrown back in my face. Having it be thrown by the thing that was actually haunting hurt more.

   I slowly sat down in the chair and let my fingers hover over the keys. Once again, I indented the next line. However, instead of immediately deleting it, I began typing.

   I couldn’t stop to make sense of what was coming out. It was as if a dam had burst open. My fingers had a mind of their own.

   I woke up to my wife putting her hand on my shoulder. My body jolted me awake and I sat up.

   Through the cloud of tiredness that surrounded my head, I heard her say, “It’s not bad. Needs a bit of work, but at least you have something.”

   I blinked a few times, trying to wake myself up. My eyes went to the computer screen. A completed poem filled the once blank page. The words were in no way as elegant as ones I had claimed to have written before, but they still painted a shaky picture. It was a poorly constructed web of apologizes.

   Some of them were to the masses, others were to I had consistently lied, and a few were to my wonderful wife. However, most of them were to Drew himself.

   “See, I told you you would get over your writer's block,” she kissed my forehead before heading into the kitchen.

   I continued to stare at the page. The three lines that had mysteriously appeared were gone.

   Either I had gone insane last night and imagined them or that really was Drew. It was a question I feared would baffle me for the rest of my life.