Edge of Nothing

Yesterday I died. It was a sad, sombre affair. I was alone. Except for Joel. Joel, who was always with me. Even at the very end. Or, I suppose, especially so. Facing death held a magnificent horror for me. Most people either have faith or don’t. Think they’re worm food or else are going to meet their maker. I was on close personal terms with my maker. I knew the end was the end. Whenever he was brave enough to see it through.

But it was done. It was over. I could let go. At least, that’s what I thought. Joel had other ideas. It was he who needed to let go. And that was the trouble. Mr Decisive had done the deed, the awful thing. Killed me off. But then changed his mind. I’m bored of it now. Not being alive, that’s actually quite a kicker, but bored of the to and fro of Joel’s narrative quandary. Let’s face it, yesterday I died. But it wasn’t the first time. And probably, knowing Joel, wouldn’t be the last.

And so today, I awoke. He has arisen! No angels singing or praying monks for me though. Just a middle-aged doughy man in M&S pyjama pants opening his eyes to an understated summer’s day in Kent. A not too fantastical resurrection. What was this, my fourth, fifth return from the dead? I could quite easily get a God complex. Except Joel, to me, was God in this scenario. Instead of getting high and mighty, I went through the motions as if it were any regular morning, heading downstairs, popping on the kettle to make a cup of tea. But then Joel remembered he was going through a cold brew phase. The tea disappeared, the kettle dissipated momentarily - I’ll have to talk to him about his transitions, they’re quite scary when they’re so sudden, although I suppose no less scary than reawakening from the dead - and I reached into the fridge to help myself to a chilled coffee. Hideous. The strength of the caffeine from cold brew messes with my nerves. I get all jittery. Joel knows this, but he forgets. It must be tough being the creator. Pages and pages of character sketches in his notebook have been pored over, but my reaction to coffee must be buried deep within, missed when he skims over detail. Like when he forgot I was vegetarian and tried to feed me ham.

Of course, these are mere complaints. None of them really compared to being killed. Would murdered be too strong a word? I don’t think there’s a word for it. It certainly isn’t a crime; despite the guilt Joel wears across his sorrowful features.  He may have killed me, but he also gave me life. Or something that looked a lot like it. In shades of grey. Given the blank page available to him, I think Joel built me a rather sour existence. One that tastes like sucking a too tart sweet, making the face screw up subconsciously. Too jealous to give me a dream life. Or too mired in reality.

If it had been up to me… well, we all have an idealised sense of ourselves. I would have made me a couple of inches taller, a couple of pounds lighter. More muscular, less flabby. Funnier, smarter and more companionable. For a while I had a dog, but Joel decided taking care of it was too much of a commitment and so it went to a farm out in the sticks (or so I tell myself). I say if it were up to me, but isn’t it? Hasn’t it always been? I’m convinced Joel’s in control of my every move, but I worry he’s a convenient excuse I use when I’m demotivated. When I can’t make myself spend a few more hours at the gym or drink a few less beers at the pub. Read more to expand my horizons rather than gaming or watching endless Netflix. How much of that can I really blame on Joel? Sometimes, I press my hand to the underside of the page, to see if I can reach him. Sometimes, I try and resist the breakfast waffles I cooked days in a row as he tried to get a romantic scene right for the girl next door. Sometimes I think it has worked. But maybe Joel is just letting me think that. If it had been up to me, maybe I would have lived this life exactly as I have. Because that’s what I’ve ended up doing. Living this life.

But if it had been up to me, I also wouldn’t have died. Not within these pages. I guess not without of these pages. But that’s a fate none of us can avoid, even me, with my own personal creator.

He’d wanted me to die in winter but talked himself out of it, worried it felt too obvious. His flaw (we both knew it) was being obvious. Subtleties always seemed within his grasp, but he couldn’t trust himself with them. He wanted to be clever. To be sharp, funny, of the moment. Nuanced. I’d been these things, once upon a draft. But no more. So, a winter death was out of the picture. If I have to die, I’d have loved to go that way, curled up on a couch, snuggled in a blanket, watching the last glowing embers of a log fire. But it was too gentle for Joel’s taste as a ‘serious’ author. He switched to me flailing against life’s cruelties in the full heat of summer. Which led to yesterday’s Hawaiian shirt incident. As I said, subtlety wasn’t Joel’s strong suit.

Someone, perhaps Joel’s creator, or as close as you can get in his world, an editor, agent or story writing judge, someone had drawn red lines through Joel’s world. I felt them like scars on my skin. They weren’t just unnerving because of the judgement they contained, but because of the instability they brought. Joel lost himself in their harsh words, dropped casually like hot coals on tissue paper. Lost the world he had created in the one they desired to promote. Lost his art for their opinions. Started treading the waters of procrastination. I don’t think they were the ones to come up with the Hawaiian shirt, that was definitely a Joel move. But perhaps, had they shown his vision more kindness, I could have died in the way he wanted, the way he felt honoured me. And wearing my statement charcoal and black rather than the gregarious palm prints I had spilt my blood all over. Perhaps, if they hadn’t needed him to sensationalise his story, I would have stayed alive. Kill your darlings, they told him. And he took that quite literally. Who was more of a darling than a protagonist that reflected your sense of self?

I felt his despair. He had made me empathetic, after all, and I really appreciated that. But was my concern for his artistic despair really going to override what started this all. That hollow existential fear when you wake up and realise you are about to die. Yesterday I died. If I’m still here today, it’s not to live. It’s to die again. And again. Until Joel gets it right. Treating it like a scene, not my life. I might get a week of respite as he works through his guilt at killing me and tries to find a narrative channel out of this maelstrom. But then he’ll give in to the voices around him. Making me go through it all again. Until everyone is happy. Everyone but me.

Drowning in the sea of powerlessness isn’t an option. Joel has written me as too pragmatic to take that route, another thing he has overlooked in the pages of my character study. He thinks he owns my fate, but I know a way out. His weakness, his indecisiveness, is the key to escape. Writing has lost its permanence with the advent of technology. The bell curve of storytelling travelling from whispered oral history to the very tangible carving on stone, then sliding across the written physical page, and now landing in the cloud. Cloud. A fluffy word for a fluffy, intangible medium. Sure, it feels secure, it feels real, to a bland observer, and the words follow on the image of a page as Joel taps on his keyboard. But his power over me in this virtual world is finite. The story doesn’t exist there – it exists in his mind. I can play him at his second guessing, at his twists and turns, and take myself back to the place where I originally took shape, where I hold the most power. Back to the notepad he bought to begin to create me, to describe my quirks, my flaws, my image, my personage. The place where I’m real. The scraping of his pen on paper, the residue of ink imprinted on the page. It feels, it exists, it’s tangible. It can’t be wiped clean by a bug or a glitch. Or deleted with the pressing of a single button. Even when the page is burnt it leaves ash. I would be ash, take physical form. If I could escape back there, I would be safe. Strolling through pages of character traits. Practising saying pithy comments, scribbled in slanting sideways scrawl in the orange biro he uses to denote speech. I’d exist in the pencil sketches he likes to doodle in the bottom left of pages. I was born, fully grown, the day he bought his teal coloured leuchtturm1917 – dotted, to allow for drawing and his belief that expansive thinking comes from not being bound by lines – and first began writing me. Writing me, not a tale. Writing who I was, who I had the potential to be. Who I loved, who I stood up for. Deciding what made me get up in the morning and face the day with a sense of purpose. I was still there. In that safe place. If I could get back there, stay there, bide some time, I could wait out this fatal train of thought.

The trick would be to make him think he was doing it. Joel was so used to everyone telling him what to do, everyone having an opinion on his writing. Everyone having an opinion on my fate. The only way to stay present, to stay here, to stay alive, was to empower Joel to keep me ticking over in the notebook. Make me something other than that character at the end of the line. Give me an edge. A problem to take off the page and into the notebook for solving.

I’d hoodwinked him, once before. It had actually been an accident. Almost like a magic trick or sleight of hand. For a second morning in a row, he’d wanted me to have coffee. At the time he was dating a girl from South America and as he was drinking super strong java, I was drinking it too. The day before it had made my stomach turn - I don’t think he’d realised, or maybe cared, too distracted by his new playmate – and so when he tried to make me flick the switch on the coffee machine I had willed my hand to move over, just three inches, and press down the kettle button. It was like a blip in the matrix. He let me go on and make my cup of tea, as though that was what was intended. I’d deceived him into believing he had written it. In the first couple of pages of his notebook, doodling one day, he had drawn a beautiful image of a glass tea pot with loose leaves in it and a China teacup next to it. Playing into this I pulled out the teapot and made a full pot of tea, and as if following my script, Joel let me use the fine China. For the next couple of days, we repeated this routine, as though Joel had created the scene himself. It didn’t last long. By the weekend I was back on the Arabica blend, but I’d stored away the trick for a rainy day. What rainier day was there than the end of mortality as I knew it? Probably.

Today was Saturday and that meant not just a morning cuppa, but one for elevenses as well. A weekend treat. Joel was a creature of habit. That gave me an hour and a half to concoct my plan. I needed to lay low until then, be surreptitious. Think summery thoughts and allow the plan to marinate at the back of my mind. Wear his ridiculous Hawaiian shirts without complaint. Let him think he was in control. Now was not the time to seek agency. I would surrender completely to Joel, let him lead the way, save my energy for 11am. For the showdown.

The morning passed calmly enough. Joel had recently made me a Wordle addict and as luck would have it (was he trying to take the edge off my last mortal day?) my starting word was the Wordle. Got it in one. It only happens once. In theory. MEDIA done and dusted with for the tenth time, I pulled up the crossword and allowed him to tax his brain trying to both write and complete it and surprise himself, through me, with the answers. This was good. Exhausting his mental energy until the hour was upon us. A completely gratuitous cuckoo clock Joel had made me buy in his flea market phase today served a purpose. It announced the fray. As the cuckoo sung out eleven little chirps, I casually rose and walked into the kitchen, reaching towards the fridge, moving towards the cold brew. Too big a shift, towards the kettle, would give me away too early. I pulled the door and tried to keep the shake from my hand, nothing could give me away now. As he reached me towards the cool coffee mix, I put all my focus into the next thirty seconds of action. Swerving suddenly to the fridge door shelves, I pulled out the bottle of kombucha that was left over from when he went through his cultured phase (and not the arty type), and popping the cork with my thumb, put the neck to my lips and drank it down in big, thirsty gulps. Finishing the bottle, I wiped my sleeve across my mouth, knowing this slobbish behaviour out of character of the neat and orderly world he wanted me in would drive him crazy, then threw the bottle with force to the floor, smashing it into pieces. The sound exploded into the room, filling me with exhilaration. Before he had a chance to react, I was back in the fridge. Playing around in the place of procrastination. This time I did go for the cold brew; to let him think he had regained control. But that went the way of the kombucha bottle, without passing my lips. I had mere seconds before he realised what was happening and stopped me in my tracks, so I began heaving everything from the shelves sending it all crashing to the floor. Butter met eggs, met an old pot of hummus and merged with the spreading brown stain of the coffee. To show him I was serious I threw a couple of beer bottles to the ground, wasting his precious craft brew, then reached for the vegetable tray. I saw myself as a vengeful spirit but realise I’m probably more akin to a petulant child. Stuffing the stalk of a broccoli floret in my mouth and biting down, I felt a familiar sensation begin to travel through me. A sleepiness like none other. Like the feeling of jetlag after a fifteen-hour flight. Something you want to resist but have no physical control over. It used to be the cover being closed. Now it was simply control, alt, delete. But the power over me was the same. I felt myself slipping from the page, slipping into a deep sleep. My last thought before my eyes closed was ‘have I done enough?’ Either I would wake to restart this page, restart this day, reset to my fate: a cold, virtual space leading to the edge of nothing, or else I would find myself under the weight of a ballpen. Stored in the comfort of physical pages. Being fleshed out, being considered. Made real. Kept alive. Counting on Joel’s indecisiveness to override all.

I awoke to a scraping sound. Reaching out my hand I felt it. Paper. Closing my eyes I traced the word Joel was writing. Erratic. A soft, slow smile spread across my face. Yesterday I died. But today, I live.