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Basking in the weight off my shoulders.
Until finally, after about a week, I went back to it.
People had seen it.
People hadreadit.
People had… loved it, and insisted they wanted to see the story brought to life, complete with all the heroes and villains, on their screens.
So I deleted it.
Because it wasn’t just…some story, it was my life. And like I’d used as a selling point for my recklessness—notonlymine.
How incrediblystupid.
It wasn’t like many people had seen it - not on some random fiction site consisting mostly of angst-ridden love stories about teenagers. I could see that it had only gathered a couple hundred views before I deleted it.
But still.
That was dumb.
Only one person—Tempest - knew I’d done that, and even her knowledge of it was purely random. I kept it to myself, because nobody elseneededto know how utterly careless I’d been, in that moment of madness.
But.
As reckless as it had been, there was no denying how having something like that to focus on, being able to pour those things onto a page and get them out of my head, had been incredibly cathartic.
So I tried it again.
Not with myownstory this time, with a story belonging to one of the other characters in my head. I’d spent enough time lonely, watching the whims and whimsies of others, I’d traveled enough, seen enough that I had the lived experience to make my imagination incredibly vivid.
It was also a little cruel.
Despite the complete opposite of a fairy tale life I lived for myself, that seemed to be what my brain favored in fiction. Sweet, warm, fuzzy, so saccharine they made your teeth hurt stories was what I specialized in.
Under a pen name.
My therapistknewabout that, but no one else did.
“Whatever it takes for you to be okay,”she’d said, thrilled that I’d found some outlet. I was sure that eventually I’d get challenged on it, forced to explore why the content of what I wrote was what it was.
But in the meantime, I just wanted to bask in it.
These stories where these people got to just behappy. They didn’t have to walk through holy fire to prove they deserved it, didn’t have to be broken and bleeding first.
They were simply happy because theywere, and what a concept that was to me.
Not that I wasunhappy - there were definitely things that brought me joy - but mostly I was just… here.
My ignored computer screen suddenly went to sleep, bathing the room in darkness. That got my attention, and I moved my mouse to wake everything back up, returning my gaze to what I’ve been looking at before my thoughts had gotten away from me.
I was supposed to be booking a writing retreat.
Escapewas a Whitfield property recently opened in Southern California. An exclusive luxury resort with private beaches and villas over saltwater lagoons. The pictures were amazing, so peaceful-looking that I wished I could just blink myself there.
Of course, I could just hop on a quick flight… if I wanted everybody in my business.
Alternatively, it was only six-and-a-half-hour drive. I could use that time of complete solitude to let whatever ideas I was taking with me marinade.
