Choose To Be Strong

Death reached into my world, took me by the hand, and tried to pull me into his embrace, but I resisted. I pulled back and refused to follow, refused to be his bitch. When Death let go, he hollowed me out, taking everything I knew with him.

***

I wasn’t really going anywhere with my life; I spent my time running or hiding from it. There had been comments made by parentals, like, “Karen could go somewhere with her singing… if she could only learn the words,” but it was always said in jest or drenched in sarcasm.

“You’re the black sheep of the family,” was said a lot by those same parentals looking up from the family bible, smiling their chocolate covered teeth in my direction.

After a while, I kind of became that black sheep. I can’t say when it happened, or how old I was, but know I was quite young. In my youth I spent my time hiding up a tree with my head in a book, The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton, or the Magic Wishing Chair, always wishing I wasn’t there. Though life would always crash through my dreams and bring me back to reality.

I lived very much in the now, because the now was all I could see of a future. Sure, I tried things, but my thoughts were always about escape and evasion maneuvers, so was never in one place, or motionless long enough to think about what I could do. I was raised to marry, it didn’t matter to who, the female parental had begun to pimp me out, when I was fifteen, to her boss's son in exchange for goods.

“Three dates,” she said. “All you have to do is go on three dates with him and I get to keep this magnificent… INSERT ITEM HERE.”

On another occasion, she tried to hook me up with a first cousin.

“It’s not unheard of,” I heard her say. “Cousins marry.”

It was like I was some big charity case that couldn’t attract a boy on my own. I had boyfriends but wasn’t allowed to. There’s a difference. She wanted me to marry for money. To make her life easier, but I was not, am not, wired that way, so I became the cliché. I was pregnant at seventeen, had my first child a week before I turned eighteen, my second child arrived in the year I turned twenty-one, and my third by the time I turned twenty-four.

I had no life that didn’t belong to someone else, and if I’m truthful, I decided on that path all on my own. Twice in my life opportunities presented themselves and offered paths to deviate from that future. The first offer came before I met my now deceased ex-husband, say that with your mouth full, the second came after I left him. Both opportunities were to join a band. If you’ve read any of my other stories, then you’d know in my teens I couldn’t psychologically accept, but the second offer gave me pause.

I was free. I was safe and secure within myself, so when the offer was made, I thought seriously about it.

You could do that, I thought, but eventually declined.

I try not to examine things too much. I don’t know why I declined, maybe I was meant for what was to come. I don’t know. It was a strange choice, but I never thought I had anything else to offer. I’d begun writing poetry before leaving my now deceased ex-husband, but it was dark, cryptic and not for everyone. I even wrote a song at the height of my self confidence rush, words and music, but I don’t recall that now either.

So, there I was, a mother and a hard worker, but it was only casual work and I wanted more. I got it. A friend of mine worked for a bus company and he got me the night cleaner’s job. I’d worked nights most of my working life, and I love the night. The air, the quiet, the stars… they envelop me. I think they are my magic faraway dreams.

I loved my new job. Got along with everyone, picked up a stalker, then a boyfriend. They were not the same person. A bus driver made a complaint to management on my behalf. I didn’t know about it until I laid a complaint myself. I was sweeping the buses as they went through the fuel bay, and my stalkers bus, let’s call him, Ray, pulled in. I looked worriedly at the fueler; he knew all about it. As I stepped onto the bus, Ray shut the doors and drove away with me inside. I could hear my friend screaming my name, screaming, “Stop!” but the driver kept going.

I moved to the back of the bus near the rear doors, pleading for him to let me out. He didn’t say a word as he pulled the bus into another row in the middle of fifty others. It was dark and he turned off the engine, which also turned off all the lights. I could still hear the fueler calling my name, and his voice was getting closer.

“Please,” I begged, “let me out.”

The driver said nothing, but I could feel him staring at me through the rear vision mirror.

Fuck, I thought, what’s he thinking about?

My heart was pounding in my ears as I gripped tight to the broom and the metal shovel, deciding which one would make a better weapon.

The shovel, I thought.

I turned to the rear doors with one hand gripped tight to the shovel, the other trying to pry them open. Suddenly he opened the doors, and I fell out into the fueler's arms.

“Get out of here,” the fueler yelled, and I ran towards lights. I ran until there was nowhere else to go.

I don’t know what the fueler said to my stalker, but he told me it was past time to report him to management. The next day I went to the bus depot around eleven-am.

“I need to see the big boss,” I said to the controller, and the big boss came out to get me almost immediately.

“Um, well, I need to report a driver,” I began as he closed the door to his office.

He waited for me to finish before saying anything.

“You mean, Ray? We all know about it,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“One of the other drivers came to see me last week. They saw Ray parked up in the bushes on the other side of the road at midnight, watching you.”

I wasn’t prepared for that and felt sick to my stomach. He gave me a seat that I’d declined when I first entered the office, because I felt stressed about reporting someone I work with, but I really didn’t know how bad it was.

“You know,” he said sliding a glass of cold water into my trembling hand, “we’ve never seen the drivers so happy to come to work, than since you started here. They all admire you, and Ray, he’s getting the sack.”

“What?” I asked, my unabated fear drenched that word in panic.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “the drivers, everyone here has your back. They’ll keep an eye out for him and if he’s found lurking around, we’ll call the police. I suggest you do the same.”

When I went to work that night, Ray was nowhere I could see, that’s not to say he wasn’t somewhere I couldn’t see. So, there was me, still living in the now, with no eye on my future and believe me when I say, I got a peak at it while locked in that bus and It wasn’t rosy.

After a few weeks, everything settled down again. The night drivers would gather around me and if I wasn’t cleaning or fueling, there was always someone by my side. One day my friend the fueler came to work and told me he’d been diagnosed with a bone disease.

“I have to quit,” he said.

When he handed in his notice, management offered me his job and I took it. This is where my past melted like a screaming witch covered in salt water, and my future became a black wall of nothing… I became nothing.

After my training for the fuelers job, on my first night, that’s when it happened. The company had hired a new cleaner. A man who’s views on women in the workplace were made obvious to me in the week prior.

“Woman bad. Man good.”

It was a series of unfortunate events that stripped me of my past and forced me to look at a future I’d never imagined. A driver brought the first bus around for the night, but halfway through his tight turning circle to pull into the fuel bay, a car full of lower managers, full of piss and bad manners, performed a U-turn in front of him. When the bus came to a stop, it was very close to the bowser. I was young, fit and slim, so the closeness did not impede my job. I was just signing off, was about to assign a row for the bus, when the new cleaner walked up behind me, and without saying a word, slipped both his hands up under my pits and began foraging through the paperwork.

“What are you doing?” I asked pushing his hands away.

“I’m going,” the bus driver said, sending me a “you poor bugger” look. “What row?”

“Eight,” I said, and he started up and pulled out of the bay just as I turned to teach the new guy about harassment in the workplace, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up on cold cement, and my heavy metal, phone box style office was hanging over me, restrained only by a power cord. The bus driver was standing nearby, obviously in shock.

“Shut off the fuel,” I remember saying, then passed out.

When I woke the next time, I could hear the indecipherable sounds of men’s voices, and the lady from the office telling me not to move, but I could see that they had cleaned the entire accident scene. No ambulance was called, and my new boyfriend told me later, that one of those drunk lower management persons in the car that caused the mayhem that ensued, was seen late that night by other drivers. He was in the mechanics bay, in the dark with a hammer and chisel and was squaring off the fuel port on the side of the bus.

I’d seen the bus when they eventually picked me up off the ground and the back steal grate had a huge tear in it where the bowser hose had hooked on to the grate as the bus drove away. With the hose snagged on the grate, the bus pulled the bowser out of the ground and it flew through the air. It catapulted into my office, into me.

Death reached into my world, took me by the hand, and tried to pull me into his embrace, but I resisted. I pulled back and refused to follow, refused to be his bitch. But when Death let go, he hollowed me out and took everything I knew with him.

In the days and weeks after, it was like all the air had been sucked out of the world. I couldn’t be around buses or any other large vehicle, and my flight response was pretty special. 0 to 10 in five seconds or less. I didn’t break anything, like bones, per se, but suffered what they described as being a full body whiplash. I had damage to my spine, degenerative damage that meant the older I got, the worse it would get, until I ended up in a wheelchair. Today, I’m closer to that diagnosis than I’d like.

I wallowed in my misery for several years. I went from this outgoing, infectiously happy person, to being nothing. The accident occurred on my partners birthday and he stuck around even though we hadn’t been dating long before the accident. He eventually began to nudge me into a future I had never considered before, academia.

I was still writing poetry, you can imagine how dark that was, and writing wasn’t anything I had ever considered as being something I could make a living with. My epic poetry maybe reached about six-hundred-words and the thought of writing a short story was a foreign concept. So, my partner continued a soft sell approach about undertaking something completely new. He obviously saw something that I never did, and I can’t be sure, but think I finally applied for higher education to stop the not-so-subtle suggestions. Ever heard the phrase, “Like a brick?” yeah, that’s where we were when I caved.

“It’d be pretty cool to tell my friends my partner’s a philosophy student,” he said… time and time again.

I pulled myself out of the dark places long enough to apply and was accepted into a Bachelor of Arts. I selected philosophy units for my first year, but by the end, I hated philosophy. On the brighter side, at least I was brushing my hair and airing my clothes. That was new and refreshing for everyone involved. Then a new emerging course became available, and I applied to participate in one unit just to see how it fit. It became the major for my BA which I completed. I didn’t do too badly with the BA because the course involved creative writing.

With a BA certificate on my wall, I was ready to sit back and just take some time off when my partner told me about a master’s he was considering. I took one look at it and applied that day. Don’t think I don’t hear about that often. It was a master’s in creative writing, and now I am a Master of Letters. During that course, I began to write. Short stories at first. They were generally avant-garde, experimental, and/or noir in nature.

During the break after my first year, I wrote an eighty-thousand-word novel, and the outline for two more to make it a trilogy. I self-published before I started my second year, and I did that because I couldn’t believe I’d written something that was over six-hundred-words, and it didn’t rhyme.

By the time I completed my master’s, I pulled down that novel for a rewrite, but in the meantime, I’d authored a trilogy during my second-year break, each book in the trilogy being eighty-thousand-words or more. I haven’t published them yet, but I do intend to contact actual publishes when I am ready. The point is, my creativity cannot be relegated to just writing. It knows no bounds.

The short story I wrote for my master’s dissertation is now an eighty-thousand-word novel, that requires one last edit, and I can start sending it out. My personal portfolio has transformed from a home page to an actual website I’m proud to display and share.

For my first-year final assessment of my masters, I wrote and recited a story in beat form, used found footage and open-source music, and having decided only two weeks prior to the end of term, that instead of the short story I had written, I would put together, Jerrymanders: A short film. My peers were concerned about the change so late in the course, but I told them I could do it. I think they and my tutor were pleasantly surprised when I handed it in.

In my second year for my final assessment, I created a concrete poetry eBook. A letter from the mother to my first protagonist in the first eighty-thousand-word novel. I knew the story so well, felt so connected to my characters, that the writing for my second trilogy, Origins, was ten times better than the first.

In 2021, when I thought I was about finished, I read a book about what it would be like if I applied for a PhD, a Doctor of Philosophy. So enthralled by the prospect, I applied and was accepted as a candidate for a part-time PhD. This leaves me with plenty of time to edit the seven books I’ve already authored, so I can send them out to publishing houses.

In the beginning, I thought my life was over. That everything I was, was gone and I was nothing. Death reached for me that day, and I recognized a power within myself when I resisted his pull. At my weakest point, I was my strongest. And the people in my life, the person in my life, who shone a light on a future I never could have imagined. He gave me the strength, the will, to want something more. He pointed me towards a future, that if I followed, would be up to me to decide what I would do with it.

Today I can confidently call myself an author and an academic. I love to write; I love to learn, and I love the direction my life took on all those years ago. I can make money from what I do now, in several different ways. I will continue to write short stories and novels, and will never stop learning, meaning I could eventually become a tutor, a master of something no-one else can do, and to outdo me, they would have to follow on from my research, to build upon it, or pull it apart and prove me wrong.

Life is a mystery. The things we take for granted can be ripped from us at any time, but it’s what we do with that life afterwards, that makes the difference between living, or dying, a little every day.

Choose to be Strong. Follow your dreams, and if they don’t pan out, there’ll be something else waiting for you, you just have to find it. It will take you on a journey you could never have foreseen or imagined. That’s what happened to me. I still miss being able to dance or going to concerts, and such, but I believe my life is full and that the path I’m on was always meant to be… or I could be another old rocker dreaming about my glory days.

When life gives you lemons, plant them and see what grows.