Four Years

Life is funny. One moment you’re trying to go to sleep, the next you have a knife clutched in your right hand aimed at your neck. You’re not sure why you picked up the knife. Was it a dream? A sudden stroke of inspiration? Either way, the adrenaline pumping through your limbs brings sharp focus to the fact that you were about to die…

Bryn presses her palms to her eyes. That day is a blur right up until 10:56 p.m. when she glanced up at the red clock above her bed, the knife still trembling in her hand. When she pulls her hands away from her eyes, the memory of the blade bobs around her makeshift office, fading slightly each time she blinks.

“This was a bad idea,” Bryn mumbles, shutting the lid of her ten-year-old laptop.

The well-meaning words of old friends echo in her ears, “You should write down your experiences, just so you don’t forget.”

Ha! As if anyone could forget the moment they almost took their own life.

They were right, though. Over time even the strongest memories can warp into something else entirely. Much like Bryn’s memories of her father.

After three years of deliberation, Bryn decided it was time to dig her laptop out of storage and finally write. Another year later she would actually do it. That was three weeks ago. It only took a few minutes to clean, but she had just finished a double shift at work and there was simply no way Bryn could write that day. The next day she was still too tired. And so became the cycle of finishing work, coming home to a silent laptop, ignoring it, and going to bed.

This, the last day of her weekend, is the first time Bryn’s calloused hands touch the keyboard, and the first time in four years writers block has the chance to take effect. It’s strange to think that four years ago she was a full time author living in her mom’s basement and making a few bucks with articles in the paper and short story competitions, only to find herself half a decade older and farther away from her dream.

Sipping her coffee, Bryn opens the laptop again. Was she crazy to believe she could actually write a good story? Especially one that is based on her own life. It would take a skilled writer to evoke the proper emotions, and someone who has not penned a single word in four years does not fall into that category.

The thin cursor blinks in time with the old red clock, reminding Bryn that each second is one wasted if not spent with fingertips bent over the faded keys. Better to try and fail then to never try, or however the saying goes. Besides, no book is written in one draft. Editing will fix all those rookie mistakes. So, without any other roadblocks, Bryn sets her coffee beside three empty mugs and a pile of unopened mail and strikes the next word onto the screen.

Young Bryn-

No, one should only name the main character after oneself when writing an autobiography.

Young Blake watches one of her favorite shows as she often does when her parents argue. This is a common occurrence, both the watching of the show and the arguing. However, unbeknownst to Blake, this time would be different.

Blake’s father storms out of the kitchen sporting his ‘angry face’, as Blake calls it. Her sister Laura, merely seven, wanders into the kitchen as their father stomps toward the front door. Then, with little to comfort the children afterward, their father slams the door shut behind him, shaking the entire house.

The theme song of Blake’s show cuts through the silence, embedding itself in Blake’s mind. Ignoring her sobbing mother in the kitchen, she focuses on the characters and their dramatized story, wishing they could become real and adopt her into their world. Blake shed no tears that day, nor would she for nearly seven years…

At the age of twenty, Blake sits sobbing on her couch in the little house she rents from elderly landlords. Though she fails to realize it at first, the show causes panic to freeze her brain. By the time she remembers why the theme song could cause such intense emotions, it is too late. A full-blown panic attack covers Blake like a thick blanket, preventing her from moving to shut off the television. Tears of confusion stream down her cheeks, falling onto the blanket her mother had sewn for her when she moved out.

The moment now resonates clearly inside her mind. After her father had left that day she had been informed that her parents would be getting a divorce. There were no emotions for Blake; her mother was crying enough for the both of them. It wasn’t until later that evening she let her emotions show, but only to her stuffed animals. She was supposed to start the eighth grade in just a few weeks; what would her friends think? She was going to be that kid with the divorced parents.

Many kids had divorced parents, as it turned out. They would often spend weekends with one and weeks with the other, or summer vacation with one and school months with the other. Christmas and birthdays were especially fun because there were twice as many presents and cookies. Some kids were lucky enough to have four sets of grandparents when their parents remarried. But not Blake.

By some miracle Blake managed to maintain contact with her paternal grandparents after her father had distanced himself from their family. The change wasn’t too drastic at first, her father often worked nights and she would rarely see him anyway, so her pubescent brain reasoned that the divorce was merely a formality. The pleasant family she had known suddenly disappeared but being eleven she was not privy to much of the information that prompted such a drastic transformation.

She recounted much of her struggles in therapy after her nineteenth birthday when she nearly killed herself. Is hard to call it an attempt because there was no plan, no note, nothing other than a burning desire to not be alive. Suicidal thoughts and ideations had become such a strong part of Blake’s life that she didn’t realize until years later that having the desire to kill oneself literally every second of the day was rather extreme. Apparently, mentally stable people don’t want to kill themselves.

Three years of therapy was enough for Blake to emerge as a functioning survivor of abuse, suicide, and depression with lingering effects that would slowly wane over the years like anxiety, panic attacks, and occasional relapses. It wasn’t until after therapy that Blake began to realize that she had, in fact, been abused as a child by not one, but two parents.

Her father was angry. Not the kind of angry that punches a wall and is over it. No, Blake’s father would become irrationally angry and though Blake had tried to block the memories, she still flinched anytime someone shouted. One summer, just before her twenty second birthday, Blake learned that her father had once taken a knife and stabbed his bedroom door nearly thirty times in front of my mother, and then carved the word ‘bitch’ into the same door. It was so faint Blake had never noticed it before her mother pointed it out. According to her mother, Blake’s father didn’t just yell; he would call his wife a pig, tell her she needed to lose weight, and make up excuses to why he was going to another city rather than his child’s band concert, which Blake later learned was to have an affair. Her mother had even told Blake that her father had been sexually abusive, though Blake was adamant about not learning the details.

Her mother was no saint either. She was controlling, manipulative, and tried to make everything about herself. While Blake had no doubt her father had done some terrible things, she also knew that her mother was prone to exaggerations, especially when it suited her needs. There was a time after Blake had turned nineteen, shortly before the suicide incident, when she was going out with a few friends to a restaurant and, like a good child, texted her mother that she would be home late. Her mother responded with an irate phone call explaining that Blake could not go out with her friends because her mother had no previous knowledge of the outing and because her mother needed to sleep. Apparently, Blake’s mother could only fall asleep when Blake was home safe. Curiously though when Blake moved out her mother seemed to be fine.

“What was I thinking?” Bryn mutters, pushing her glasses farther up her nose. This is a terrible story. It’s dry and emotionless, neither of which will make an audience fall in love with or even pity the main character. No one wants to read something that simply states, “This character is sad. This character is mean.” A writer must make the reader feel what the character is feeling, rather than tell the reader what to feel.

With a sigh, Bryn pushes herself away from the laptop and steps through her front door just in time to glimpse the sun setting over the distant mountains. All those writing classes in college and she still writes like a ninth grader. No number of tips or tricks could help someone without any talent.

As the sun sinks just below the horizon, Bryn returns to the laptop and deletes all but the first paragraph. That one isn’t so bad. Maybe the story just needs a different direction. After all, giving away a character’s entire backstory in just a few pages is not very good writing. It is often best to make the reader wait, to give them a reason to keep reading. Such things seem so obvious, and yet they are so difficult to put into practice.

One more cup of coffee ought to be enough to get in a few more hours of writing. Then six hours of sleep and off to work again. At this rate, the book will be finished in about four years.

“Best not waste any time,” Bryn utters, cracking her knuckles even though her mother tells her not to.

Mother would be angry if she found blood on the carpet. It’s a good thing there isn’t any. All that adrenaline you had moments ago fades and you’re left with only shallow breaths and a beating heart. A heart that in a parallel universe would be pumping out gallons of blood through a gaping hole in your neck.

It’s strange how often we take such things for granted. Any one of us could spontaneously die at any moment, whether it be in a freak car accident, or heart attack, or even impulsively driving a knife into your skin. No matter how it happens, or how quickly, there will be a moment in which a person realizes they are about to die, and it is in this moment a person understands why we continue to live…