Beloved Nothingness

The first piece of paper in Annabel's box was her mother's suicide note. Incriminating sketches, love letters, harrowing confessions, and secrets scrawled on looseleaf joined it soon after.

When her teenaged mother dies, Annabel is adopted by a man who didn't father her. She spends her adolescence grieving for a woman she pretends to remember, all while piecing her heritage together from the tormented letters that propose more questions than they answer.

Years later, she meets Garald Konstanov while drawing strangers on a train bound for New York City. He escaped his stifling family in Russia to pursue photography, and their infatuation with capturing the world through art while escaping the sorrow of their parents' mistakes binds them together despite their differences. Their brief sense of comfort is stolen by a child whose name is written on piles of undelivered letters aging in Annabel's shoe box.

Haunted by a loss of purpose without the ones she loves, Annabel turns once again to her scraps of paper. As love and lust ignite and extinguish, her box only fills with words heavy enough to kill.

"Beloved Nothingness" is told through Annabel's perspective, and the writings of others important enough to compose or receive letters stored in that box in the back of her closet.