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Unplanned and Unexpected

By E.J. King

By EJ KingPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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The Rose that grew after Rosabel’s death with a rosebud for Quilliam Shakespeare forming

If there’s anything I learned in life, it’s all sorts of things that are unplanned and unexpected. A balloon could pop out of the blue, a rollercoaster could break down and leave its riders to dangle upside down for hours. Life itself is the most unplanned and unexpected however, I’m not here to bore anyone to tears.

On April 1, 2019, I was told by my mother that we were moving back to Georgia , the peachy state, not the country. It being April Fool’s Day of that year, I thought it was an impish attempt to trick me. Her seriousness was dripping off her face along with some tears.

Three days later that same year, I was given a going away party. It didn’t soften the blow of leaving my Floridian friends and family behind. Upon arrival back to Albany, Georgia, I was already bored from the slow WiFi and the lack of forms of entertainment aside from my limited electronics. I eventually found myself scrolling through a list of story prompts for ideas instead of text messages.

I stopped mid-scroll; taking notice of one of the prompts, which read: “Write a story where the main character is going through what you’re going through.” I stroked my chin as if I had a goatee as inspiration began to form in my brain. That’s when I decided to write the story called “Breakthrough” since I was breaking through a major writer’s block made of all sorts of negative emotions.

The main protagonist was an autistic male writer named Eric Queen. He was basically a male me, but he wasn’t always that. His hair was straight and black in the first chapter alone, but I decided to make it like mine instead; dark brown and curly. I eventually made a joke about this in a later chapter. I spent a very long time observing my family like a spy on a mission.

I jotted down everything that was intriguing, and when I ran out of ideas on a certain day, I’d have Eric travel to the world inside his head. Inside his world, would be labyrinths and all sorts of obstacles. There were also dangers and nightmares, but there was also allies and Memory Trees with Memory Leaves.

To make a long summary short, Memory Trees basically grow from memories you have, doesn’t matter if they’re good or bad memories, they grow from it and their Memory Leaves show the memories for as long as you remember them. When you start to forget, the trees begin to shrivel up and die like an unattended flower bed.

Back to what I was saying about “Breakthrough” as a whole, I wrote like I was running out of time. I wrote with the prompt as my path and the quote by Isabel Allende behind the wheel. The quote was “Write what should not be forgotten.” Anyone who knows me well, will know that I took this to heart.

Before I knew it, I had finished chapter ten of “Breakthrough” and I felt like my sleepless nights can finally come to an end. That was until I received word from my mother. I hoped that she was going to tell me that we were moving back to Tampa, Florida. Unfortunately, this was not the case at all. Instead, she told me that my grandpa wasn’t doing well.

I thought to myself that August of 2019 was the Month of Death that started with an orange tabby named Peanut dying. I may sound like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not unfortunately. After that cat kicked the bucket, on August 19, 2019, my first hedgehog Rosabel died at age three. Now to be fair, three years old is thirty nine years old in hedgehog years. When she died, I remembered that my grandpa told me with sincerity and a country drawl, “I’m sorry ‘bout yer hedgehog.”

A few days later, I found out he had died by my crying mother. To me, she’s the toughest person I know and to see her cry is certainly something that I don’t often see. I said goodbye to my grandpa through my tears and hoped September would be a better month, but there was one minor bump. My second hedgehog, a rescue that I named Quilliam Shakespeare, had to be put down on September 19, 2019 at age three due to oral cancer.

These reasons alone were why I decided to add more to “Breakthrough”. “Five more chapters should do it.” I thought through my tears. Of course, I found it hard to write anything different for a while, so I decided to write “Breakthrough” until the well went dry. How long did that take? Well, it finally dried up on April 14, 2020 and had forty four completed journals.

I’d say that I ended it on a good note. Of course, after I wrote some more short stories, I found myself in front of another writer’s block and weighed down by boredom. Any writer’s top two enemies. Then on December 10, 2020, I found myself narrating out of boredom, it started with experimenting then ultimately deciding to make a short, spin off series to “Breakthrough”, I called it “Unnecessary Narrative” and put myself in the main protagonist role this time.

That story took less journals, but it was still pretty long compared to most of my stories. Anyways, the bottom line is that what I learned from all this writing was that you should write what should not be forgotten, journals are expensive, pens run out of ink way too quickly, and I love my family and how quirky they are! In fact, they’re so quirky that they’re enough to write not one, but two memoirs!

Quilliam Shakespeare moments before being put down due to his oral cancer

A weak Rosabel a day before she died

A rough sketch of a healthy Memory Tree with its Memory Leaves by E.J. King

extended family
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About the Creator

EJ King

I write like I breathe. I am autistic, but I don’t let that defy me, I love writing. From something scary as a lonely girl unleashing a fiend thinking it was a spell to give her a friend to something funny as a guy being kissed by a duck!

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