Slender Black Ink

The pages weren’t yellow when I first found them. It wasn’t the yellow brick road, but more like black stepping stones on a pale gray, faded manilla backdrop that blotted out a world of violence and the sweetness of death. Following that path I found someplace other than where I was. The first chapter book I read was the ‘Wizard of Oz’ by Frank Baum. There had been a mountain of Little Golden Books before that, shelves of them in my grandparents’ house. I’d already tried writing stories though. The first memory I have of writing a story was on a dark and not stormy night. I sat on the floorboards on the back seat of some car. I don’t know where my mom got the car. My ink was blue, the pages were in one of those rainbow pads. It was just me and Captain Kirk and some monster. When I look back to that moment, I expect I thought I was happy. I wasn’t. It was cold. I was hungry. I was probably seven, with long brown hair, and hunched over that little notepad, I wrote page after page in huge letters because I needed glasses and I thought that was normal. I thought I was happy.

In high school, trying so hard to be a girl, to be what my new husband wanted, what his family’s church wanted, after I organized the small little library, I found an IBM Selectric typewriter and I typed. I was seventeen. It was my second marriage. He gave me food and let me pet the farm cats, let me go to school. I had glasses by then. Those keys under my fingers, the click of each letter, click, click, click, and to this day it makes me smile. There were vampires and sword fights and on the page where I existed in ways that I had never even imagined being able to exist in the world. I rode spaceships and rescued artifacts. I loved my fedora. Maybe I was happy.

When my kids were in high school, I sold my first novel. The sun was weak that day, but bright for Seattle. Happiness echoes, like one photon hitting another and causing a chain reaction and across years, just as sorrow and trauma can echo, so too do happiness and joy. It was a mix though, of acceptance and rejection. There was enough of me in that novel, ‘Sarah’s Hawk’, that it felt like I was being accepted, but there was enough in that book that conformed to what the world wanted that it wasn’t really about me.

It sold well enough that I had some leverage and I got them to take books that were more me, less socially acceptable. Therein was the problem. Acceptance and belonging are instinctive needs. The more me the stories got, the less well they sold and the more alone I felt. Everything stopped selling. One daughter moved on to college. Eventually, the other daughter moved in with her sister. My splendid black rune road disappeared. I was lost.

The memory of happiness got harder and harder to find. It’s like being in a horrible snowstorm. Death is in the air, cold in the air, and everywhere looks the same, as if it doesn’t matter where one goes or what one does; it’s all white death. It’s so easy to forget everything except pain and fear and they can even get cozy and almost warm, as if at least one knows the reason why nothing works, or ever will. Maybe I thought I didn’t want to be found.

Twelve years later, the slender thread of black ink on the screen draws me towards light that I never understood before. I don’t remember what I thought about when I started ‘Kiss of Death’. I wrote it in one sitting, the first chapter. My life became metaphor. A ghost caught at the scene of the crime, forgetting himself, his friends, his reason, forgetting everything, sinking into the darkness like a warm blanket, knowing it would smother him and he was comfortable with that outcome. Then in the last sentences, that slender thread of digital ink jerked in a different direction. I am at my most honest, most real, most vivid with my fingers resting on the smooth worn keys of my keyboard. So here I am, my little heater on and Spotify playing my liked songs as I sit here with whoever reads this bit of digital ink. I’m hopeful.

Tonight I finished the second chapter of Kiss of Death. It only took me a month, which is a very long time for me. All of the ways I thought it was going to go, it didn’t go. It wasn’t magical happily ever after. That’s how it was in those books I used to read so long ago that now their pages would be yellow and brittle. Happily ever after was what heroes got and it never ended. Happy doesn’t work that way. What ‘Kiss of Death 2’ did for me though was it gave me permission to be happy, to be messed up sometimes, and to get back up after that. In this story, the main character’s adopted mother wrapped her arms around him while he was in this scary ghost state, hugged him and loved him as he was and told him that things aren’t supposed to be supernova vs black hole. They’re supposed to be the planet away from both those things. Things are supposed to be night sometimes and day sometimes and if one wants tulips, one will have to plant them. She said that in really different ways, but that’s what she meant. My friends and family love me, just as my character’s friends and family love him. My music is loud. Root beer is sweet on my tongue. My fedora is on my head now, not just a fantasy, but I am the character in my stories. I am really me at last. Sunlight, not supernova happy, but just healthy warm sunlight bubbles in me and makes me smile. I am happy. I will be happy. Not always, but I’ll never lose it completely again.