The Vow

Malayah Stevenson chewed her fingers that happened to be nothing more than nubs as she stared at her computer screen that held nothing more than a blank Microsoft Word document. She wrecked her brain back and forth on what to write--anything to write, but absolutely nothing came to mind, and it was driving her crazy. 

After spending the last five years out of touch with her writing, she decided that today would be the day she opened her computer to do so since the 2020 pandemic started, and she was currently stuck in the house. She couldn’t go to her office job, where she worked as an accountant, and she currently had no assigned tasks to do from home, which left her bored with nothing else to do. 

She’d binged watched enough television shows for her whole townhome community, and she was tired of watching television as she had for the past three weeks. She’d caught up on all the books she’d started and had even started another one, but she was growing bored of that, too. So, her last resort was to try writing. 

When her father passed away during her freshman year of college, Malayah had fallen into such a deep depression that had prolonged her progress as a writer. Writing had been a passion that had stringed from her father. Her father, Arnold Stevenson had been a third time New York Bestselling Author, a National Book award recipient in the year previous to the year he passed away, and he’d received a plethora of other awards for the amazing nonfiction books he wrote on relationships, life lessons, and parenting with a side of poetry. As a child, Malayah had written several books--two that she’d won awards for in the Young Authors competition and another that had gotten national recognition on how beautifully she’d written a book to inform readers of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in the pursuit of gaining voting rights for African-Americans in 1965. 

At the end of high school, she’d enrolled at New York University to pursue journalism with a minor in creative writing because she had hopes of writing urban fiction and children’s books for a living. Her life was flipped upside down when her father passed away on New Year’s Eve after suffering a stroke while she was home for Christmas after completing her first semester of college. She had been growing strong, absolutely loving the journalism program at her university, but her father’s death only pushed Malayah further away from her writing.

When she returned to school, she switched her major to accounting and hadn’t touched a book since, other than to read content for her classes or an article of interest. When people mentioned her father’s books, which they continued to make and sell, even to this day, she never mentioned anything, and acted as though it was a coincidence that she and the man, who was easily her twin physically, shared the same last name. 

Malayah had put a void on something she used to couldn’t live without, and it showed as she sat in bed, her laptop settled into her lap with not one word typed. She couldn’t even produce ideas of what to write. After her father’s death, she’d thrown away all of her journals and notebooks that held all her ideas, short stories, and even novels she’d written as a teen, when all her friends and family teased her for always having her head in a journal instead of going outside to hang out with those her age. 

She closed her eyes as she felt a tear at the brim of her eye, fighting to make its way out and roll down her cheek but Malayah refused to allow it. She was too strong to cry over not being able to type a couple of words. 

So, she lied. She covered her face with her hands, as the tears poured out of her eyes and a thunderous cry fell from her lips as she thought about where she’d gone wrong. As she spent some much needed time reflecting while on quarantine, she came to the realization that she should have never changed her major because she couldn’t cope with her father’s death. If anything, it would have felt like he was still around, and she still had the chance to make him happy and carry his legacy on further than it had gone. 

Her other family members didn’t understand how someone so gifted at writing could go from doing it every waking moment to none whatsoever, but they supported her decisions nonetheless, believing it would all be a phase and she would eventually go back to her first love. Malayah hadn’t. She’d, instead, stuck with accounting, and she couldn’t deny how miserable she’d been at work, but she stuck with it because it paid her bills. Now, that she was being paid to stay home, she was attempting to try out her writing again, and it seemed that she couldn’t even do that. Malayah was heartbroken. 

“Ernest Hemingway said, and I quote, “All you have to do is write one sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” If things ever become hard and you feel like you can’t write, cry out your frustrations, scream, throw a tantrum if you need to, but at the end of the day, remember this quote. It can be about an experience, something you read, a controversial topic, and just watch all the ideas that flow to you. Write them all, and go back later to choose the best one. Now, if you’re like me, you’ll try to write them all because I believe everything I write is amazing.”

Malayah could hear a conversation that she shared at age eleven with her father replaying in her head causing her to smile weakly as his husky chuckle filled her head. She could remember herself nodding after everything he said, listening intently to his instructions. 

“Don’t worry about how crazy it may look or sound as you write it because it’ll all make sense in the end. Never, and I mean, never ever give up on yourself and your writing, and I mean it. You’re gifted, and you have an extraordinary voice with plenty to get out and on the shelves. I’ll understand if you find another interest, but as long as writing is important to you, keep doing it, baby girl. You hear me?”

She could see herself nodding again as she and her father shared a hug, and all Malayah could do was break down crying all over again, dry heaving as her shoulders shook back and forth from how hard she was crying. She hadn’t kept her promise to her father, and now she felt like nothing more than a failure. 

Keep it together, Malayah. You can’t cry over spilled milk. Get up and do something about it! She thought as her hands came in contact with her wet face and she roughly wiped her tears away. 

“Your father would not want you crying over this, Malayah. Get it together,” she told herself, aloud not expecting a response because she was in her home, all alone in the middle of the day. 

She shoved her computer on the side of her and forced herself from underneath her sheets and into her house slippers. She rushed to her kitchen, preparing her kettle for a glass of green tea and rummaged through her refrigerator for the cheese bagels and cream cheese she’d gotten at the store on the previous day. 

She worked quickly to make herself a late breakfast, determined to get words on the paper today by any means necessary. She may have fallen short on the promise she made to her father in the past, but she wouldn’t any more because she was changing that. She cleaned up the small mess she made, returning the items back to their rightful place before heading back up the stairs to her bedroom to try again.

She savored her bagel, took short sips of her scorching hot tea that was indefinitely burning her tongue before looking at her computer again. 

Immediately, her mind went to a conversation she’d had with her cousin just the previous week about 50/50 relationships. While her cousin, Justine felt strongly for 50/50, Malayah was an advocate for 100/100 relationships. Justine didn’t think 100/100 relationships existed, but Malayah knew different as she remembered watching her parents grow up. 

100/100 didn’t necessarily mean that her mother and father did everything, for they both had strong and weak points, but they were both two, whole and complete individuals in a relationship of longevity. Malayah saw 100 to mean individualism with qualities to bring into a relationship, while 50 was only half a person with only so much to give. Malayah didn’t believe relationships could exist, at least not for long, based on that. 

Right away, she typed out the sentence, “Relationships cannot be 50/50.”

Before long, she came up with two common names and began to write a short story on a relationship that was 50/50 that only ended with a bunch of problems, a plethora of ongoing emotional and mental issues within each individual, and just a messy finish because two children had been involved. It was a situation very much close to that of her cousin, who believed in 50/50 relationships. 

Malayah wiped the imaginary sweat from her forehead as she punctuated her final sentence and stared at her computer in pure amazement. 

She’d done it, and in only twenty-five minutes. She basked in the feeling of completion she felt, though she knew she was nowhere near complete with her journey as a writer. She just knew she felt lighter in her spirit, and she could only hope her father was smiling down on her from the Heavens above. 

She took her time rereading her story, fixing minor spelling errors as she did so, and in the end, she was even more satisfied with what she’d read. That day, she’d made a vow to herself that she’d never stop writing. If not for herself, her father was reason enough.