The Write Way

Chapter 1: Dark Characteristic

   There's a certain serenity when the sky shuts down for the night, and the light goes out, replaced by a million orbs peering through a hazy canopy of clouds. The horizon, the mountains, the existence of distance and space and time becomes shallow and sullen. The walls of dusk close in, blanketing the rocky coastline and the houses that perch high above the receding tide.

   It's in this state that my mind slows to a crawl, finally finding focus on the tasks at hand. I recall my father's words, his voice slick with cheap scotch. "Daylight is a scattering of puzzle pieces that you'll forget to piece together come midnight."

   He spent too many nights piecing together the blurry images of his life, aided by alcohol and regret and the fear that cements your feet to your misfortune. He looked old that night, his voice low as a tide in the moon's first quarter. "Forgetting may be the greatest gift of all. Learn, kid, to never reflect. It'll kill you before your mistakes will."

   I didn't get it. Not then.

   He'd been a giant to me, even at his lowest point, a pillar of stability and strength. A weathered oak tree in the face of a gale. Battered, yes. But impossible to knock down. Something permanent I hadn't considered might not always be around.

   And yet, his words have never left me. They're like a sullen shadow, matching me step for step.

   Learn to never reflect. That's what he wanted to teach me. And yet . . .

   My talent is reflection.

   My father had bummed cigarettes alone in the dark of sleepless nights, his face twisted in thought as he remembered. Life, he wrote on a page I often return to, was a circle that went around and around, each time a bit wider as a new lesson was instilled. But he'd written in his journal that his circle was getting smaller. The last time he wrote, he'd noted there was no circle at all. Simply a dot.

   My nights are not unlike my father's. Accompanied by whiskey and regret, the past and the present, my fountain pen scratches till the break of dawn. The difference is, people pay me for my suffering. The public wait impatiently, eager to know more about the characters I've created out of necessity and lean on too heavily. The line between reality and imagination are blurring more and more, and the alcohol is slowly marrying them.

   That's tomorrow's problem.

   That's what I'm always telling myself lately. Perhaps tomorrow I'll set some boundaries to maintain a grip on what's real.

   I roll over and get up an hour before sunset. I cook a light dinner and crack a window as I take in the cool air and wonder if it will rain again tonight. The sound of the thick drops on the tin roof helps me relax, helps me dive deep into the caverns of my mind to write.

   To the east, the ocean is alive, its rhythmic heartbeat filling my ears and soothing my nerves. Seagulls cry in the shrouded distance, and the wind beats down from the north, a winter wind. On its cold breath are the first raindrops of the night.

   My hands shake in anticipation as I pore scotch into a tumbler and sit down at my desk to write.

   Every night I go to war with myself, extorting the trauma bottled up deep inside, spilling it out onto the paper before me. There's a violence in the way they emerge, fighting to be in control, to be in the foreground, to control the narrative and taint the details. But it's easier to get them out in the open then keep them locked up inside my head. Out in the open they are smaller and weaker, continuing to shrink as they become what they really are.

   Words.

___________

   It begins with one word.