After the Silence – Part 10

I hate endings.

Like, a lot.

No, way more than you’re thinking.  Yes, even more than that.

The end of a book is a form of death to my mind.  It is the same sudden sense of loss and finality that I have felt with the deaths of my family.  I’d never really worried about that feeling with books because I’d never had anything to compare it to.  It had always been the melancholy of endings, not something sinister.

Then life happened and I started writing, and now the two are so inextricably linked that I can barely imagine a time where I didn’t conflate the two.

Fast forward to the present.  Picture the scene: Me in my chair, chair up to my desk.  One hand rests on my chin, fingernails in my mouth.  The other swirls one of my omni-present cans of soda.  I hem.  I haw.  A finger escapes its toothy jailer, hangs over a key, then returns to its shackles, desperate to escape maddening freedom.

Replay this scene ad-nauseam.  Now you know where I have been.

Part of me, the part that doesn’t rear its ugly head until I’m nearly asleep simply to remind me that I have to die one day, doesn’t want to finish this story.  It wants the painting to contain a blank space for the rest of time.  The story cannot die if it is never completed.

That, of course, is a lie.  Never finishing is still an ending just like any other would be: Damning my story to limbo is still finality.  In choosing such an end, all I have done is cheat myself of the momentary victory of pushing through my fears to the finish line.

I have to muster my courage and soldier through the fears and the lies to the end.  My insides quiver at the thought, but courage is not the absence of fear.  It is being terrified and doing the thing which frightens you anyway.  So I’m going to ratchet my courage to 11, and get this party started.

THIS.  IS.  THE UNSHEATHED QUILL!!!!

After the Silence – Part 10

For the good of the land, I have destroyed this post!

Vengefully,

The Unsheathed Quill