Die in Tune

Some people say that when we grieve, we go through various phases. The first one being shock. My mind was numb. I dragged a stick along some broken fences, under the dark sky full of stars. My mind was blank, yet filled with confused emotions. My eyes were wide, but unreadable. The stick made an annoying sound, but it didn’t bother me.

“I’m sorry,” he began “She didn’t make it…” My mind shut down from everything else at that moment. Harriet was dead. Dead. He continued talking, explaining how the bullet had almost missed the heart, but unfortunately, it hit a bit. They couldn’t stop the bleeding. And she died. Died. When he saw me staring at the wall behind him with a blank expression, he understood that I needed time alone.

I was left standing there in the silent, empty waiting room No longer waiting, who was there to wait for? Nothing but the sound of my heart beats broke the silence. It was beating fast. My breathing seemed to stop. An icy chill started forming at my feet and creeping up my spine as the information began to sink in.

She was gone. Gone.
The narrator in my head was substituted by replays of the news being revealed to me. The narrator had returned to his hiding place and locked the door. Maybe permanently.

No tears were running down my face. No expression was visually clear, to be quite frank. Maybe shock… Maybe that was just me still shocked with the news. Maybe I was wrong: maybe it still hadn’t fully sunk in like I thought back in the hospital before I left and it was still sinking in.

Harriet was dead. Gone. Forever. That was the simple, irreversible truth.

That’s the first phase: the mental numbness and incapacity to generate coherent thoughts until the shock wore off. They described the second phase of grief to be one of denial. Once the shock wore off, you would realize the truth. The truth would be a terrible mirage.

Harriet couldn’t be dead. The doctors had been lying to me. She was somewhere in the hospital, recovering from a life-saving operation: lying in a bed, machines attached and her pulse beating healthily. She was alive. She had to be.

Nobody ever accepts death in the beginning. They start inventing reasons to convince themselves that it hadn’t happened, that it was all a big joke. That someone would pop up and reveal that you were a victim of a reality TV show and you were just part of a big prank.

That’s what you make yourself believe, what you believe. You deny death.

You deny it and try to find some way to change it. This is the next phase: bargaining. It’s the phase where you look up to whichever higher power you believe in, whether in God, Buddha, or the Goddess, and plead for them to erase the death of your loved one from the chronological order of events.

I dropped the stick once the fences ended and looked at the sky. And though I didn’t believe in any of the powers afore mentioned, I asked whoever was above, whoever was watching the whole world like a TV show “Why?” Isn’t that the question you always ask before you try to bargain with the almighty authorities from the sky?

“Please, please, I’ll do anything. Just, please, make her come back.” You’re speaking to whoever may hear you. You’re speaking to nobody at all. It’s a rhetorical plea. No deal ever comes out of it. You can drop to your knees and plead a million times, but the person will still be dead, gone.

Anyone who would see me now, shouting, bargaining with the sky, would think I was crazy or in the process of becoming. It was hopeless, yet I was still staring up for a response, a signal.

It was my fault she had died. It was my fault because I hadn’t brought the authorities into the mess we got tangled up in when we had the time. It was actually my brilliant idea to come up with the money by ourselves. I was to blame. My fucking fault.

I looked away from the sky, my head hanging low, my eyes watching my feet as they moved in the same repetitive movement, one foot in front of the other and repeat, and the ground moving underneath me.

I crossed my arms because I suddenly felt colder. Guilt covered every single piece of fabric I was wearing, every hair on my scalp… All of me. This was, surely, just another phase of grief.

Near my house, I looked at the porch and felt nostalgia as I remembered when we had started waltzing horribly singing along to musical classics. Now she was gone. My fault. I stepped into my house which, at that time, was empty. I was alone. She wasn’t with me. I was alone. And it was my fault.

It’s with the guilt phase that the fact that the person is gone is completely absorbed. You start beating yourself up for it all, even when you aren’t the one to blame. Maybe it’s just one way for you to come to terms with it, making up a reason for the person to no longer with his or her presence. Only few things in life are certain, most of them remain mere possibilities, mere maybes.

I climbed the steps, the cold environment starting to warm up as my steps got faster and rougher. My hands clenched into fists. My steps got louder and my forehead creased as my eyebrows furrowed. My lips pursed into a thin line. When I opened my bedroom door, it was as if I had punched it open.

Rage was pushing all the guilt out of my mind.

I wanted to find it. I wanted to destroy it. It still haunted me how my story wrote itself into a sad, tragic ending without my consent. I wanted to rip it, burn it. I wanted to get rid of it all. It was a longing in my heart.

It was in my backpack. I threw it onto the bed and thought what to do with it. I looked at it. Trying to fake innocence,I thought. I picked it up, containing my rage as I ripped off almost every single page of my notebook and looked for sticky tape. There was one roll in my drawer. I cut off little pieces and started sticking the pages to the only wall in my room where there weren’t any posters: the one in front of my desk.

Sticking them in no particular order, the only sound that surrounded me was the one of the papers meeting the walls and the tape going on top of them. It was all an impulse, an instinct. Pushing things off my desk to go on top of it and continue sticking the pages of my notebook above it, not caring about what happened to the items that once resided my desk and that were now falling one by one.

It was all a mixed up puzzle, nothing was in order. I backed away, picked up a black felt-tip pen and stared at my whole work before me, mocking me. The urge to write was no longer there. It was replaced by the one to destroy. I stepped closer to the sheet that was in the middle of the whole puzzle, and started with it: scribbled “Harriet is dead” in big bold letters across the page.

After writing this, I felt my grip tighten around the pen as I looked at the bigger, darker letters that overlapped my horrible calligraphy. I used the hand that was holding the pen to hit the paper, the pen forming big, black dots on the paper.

A murderer piercing screamers’ throats. A boy not containing his fury.

I was drawing lines across the papers, each one overlapping the previous one, covering the whole story in scribbles. I also wrote incoherent words and thoughts with violent and rough handwriting. The tale of a fictional city was slowly disappearing. All my work gone.

Some pages were even falling on the ground, crumpled up from the pressure I applied when I wrote on them, and abandoned like orphans on the floor. I started screaming the words I was scribbling furiously with the pen, even when the sheets of paper were colored pitch black. I was writing to the point of poking through the sheets and ripping some bits of paper.

I threw my pen on the floor and started ripping the pages to shreds. The tiny bits would cover my floor like white, gray and black snow or tears of what was once precious to me. The city was gone. The murderers, screamers, witnesses, Supreme Court – all of it gone, all of it trash. Worthless, meaningless trash scattering all over my floor.

The sun was beginning to leave its hiding place and paint the sky in streaks of red and orange. My windows were open and the cold morning breeze enveloped me. A new day. A new, completely different day.

My rage was wearing off, leaving me with a feeling of emptiness inside. My fists unclenched and my face adopted a calm expression. I watched the last pieces falling to the ground, almost magically and in slow motion, the words being erased from the world, erased from my mind.

The perception of time was gone. An hour could be a second. A second could be a day. A day could be a minute. It all depended on how you were feeling in that day, hour, minute or second. And as the first sun rays hit my arm, a tear formed in my eye. When they hit my face, the forces of gravity forced the tear to roll down my face and onto the ground to join the abandoned bits of ripped paper.

The beginning of a new day, the beginning of a new phase: depression.

A breeze blew into my room, a breeze of sadness. I looked at my bed, it was empty. I remembered how she would lie there and watch me write, I remembered her annoying me with the camera, and I remembered that night. That wonderful night. Memories I wish I could’ve snapped and kept as a photograph. Photograph, I remembered. I looked for my camera, my body trembling, my steps were slow and I was feeling frail and breakable.

My drawer was full of objects, among them I found my camera. I scanned through the various pictures she had taken of me writing and found the one she took of the both of us. Her cheeks were rosy and her eyes were full of life – she was dead now and was pale the last time I saw her. I only wish the last image I saw of her would be the one in the camera: smiling and happy.

Taking some steps backwards, I felt my back hit the wall in a matter of seconds. Still holding the camera in my hands I dropped to the floor, sitting with by back still up against the wall. My arms started shaking and more tears formed in my eyes. I wiped my tears on my shirt sleeve and continued looking at the picture.

Her smile was slowly killing me, breaking me into little pieces, just like my story. I would never see her smile again. Only in a photograph. It wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t the same as when she annoyed me until I gave her attention and then she smiled at my slightly annoyed expression.

My parents weren’t home, once again in some trip, this time to visit my grandma who was slightly ill. I was going to go too, but decided to stay. My room was now bright with the sunlight. My tears had wet my cheeks and chin. My knees bent and legs close to my torso. My gaze was never leaving the small screen on my camera with the picture, even as the battery started running low. Whenever it turned off, I would turn it on, only to expect it to turn off again.

When the battery finished completely I just buried my head in my knees and cried like I never cried before. I wasn’t one person for crying. I hated feeling weak and hopeless. But that’s exactly how I felt at that moment.

The camera sat by my side and the only sound came from my loud sobs. Then I heard the door downstairs open. Someone was carrying in groceries. I looked out of my window and saw the sun already up in the nearly perfect pale blue sky minus the few clouds. The watch indicated that it was already morning.

I hadn’t slept the whole night and I had gone through almost all the phases of grief too fast, each one only lasting a couple of hours. I heard footsteps going up. Anita usually only woke me up when it was almost time for school and not even the alarm would make me leave my bed. She was about to knock when she noticed that the door was open and she had a clear view of the mess I had created. She saw me sitting in the floor in the same position I had been for at least an hour, wearing a bloodstained shirt and crying my heart out. Her eyes got wide and her maternal side immediately kicked in.

“Kaleb, what happened?” She sat beside me and looked at my shirt and at my face. She saw all the blood and she started mumbling some words I didn’t understand in Spanish. She looked at my shirt and then at my eyes, hers were pleading me to answer her.

“Harriet died…” I looked away as I said those words. Then fearing she would start her long comforting talks, even though she was also shocked because she had met Harriet and adored her presence at our house, I said “I don’t really want to talk about it, I want to be alone for a while…” My words were choked out. It felt like weeks since it happened. It felt like seconds since it happened.

She spoke some words, but they were a blur to me. I could only hear her steps walking away from me and out of my room. I urged myself to leave that spot and go to the bathroom. I could only imagine how awful I looked, even after cleaning myself up in the hospital. I desperately needed a shower, mostly to see if the water could wash away all the pain and sadness within me.

The icy water hit my skin like sharp icicles. I felt my body heat dropping as I shivered underneath the showerhead. The sweat and the blood were washed away with the water and went down the drain, but what I wanted to wash away, stayed firmly in its place.

Rubbing a bar of soap roughly on my skin, I wished it would all spill out of my body, but only managed to make my skin have blotchy pink marks from pressing the soap too hard in the same spot. I threw the bar at the corner and allowed some more tears to escape my eyes. A union was formed between my tears and the cold water as they plummeted down and through the drain. I looked up and let the water hit my face.

After a while, I decided to turn the water off and leave the shower. I wrapped a towel around my waist and threw every article of clothing I had worn that night into the trash can. I never wanted to wear them again. I would ask Anita to discard them as soon as she could.

My room still remained in the same state I left it. Huge contrasts between my tidy and untouched bed and my messy floor and wall in front of it. The camera and the pen still lay among the bits and shreds of paper and the calm breeze no longer blew. It wasn’t so early in the morning anymore. I got dressed and didn’t even bother to fix my hair or put any sort of cologne. I didn’t bother if I looked good or not. Nothing mattered at this point: I wouldn’t be able to impress the person I wanted to. Not even see that person I wanted to see so badly.

I left the house, not even bothering to tell Anita where I was going: Harriet’s house. I knew her mom had a night shift so she probably didn’t hear the news yet. I had given Harriet’s information to the hospital, but I didn’t know her mom’s cell phone number, so I just gave her home phone number. My eyes squinted at the sudden exposure of my eyes to the bright light of the sun. I walked slower than usual that day, because I was exhausted.

As I stood before her house, I could see that everything was the same: in the house, in the neighborhood… The thing is: everything looked the same, but nothing felt the same.

Her mom’s car wasn’t in her driveway, so she hadn’t arrived yet. I sat at her doorstep to wait. Everybody’s daily routine seemed to continue as mine came to a halt. My eyes were sore from crying. I hated crying, I hated feeling broken inside. In the end, all of us, even the coldest person, has some weakness, some Achilles heel, which could trigger the waterworks.

I heard a car engine approaching, so I looked up and saw the old, red car that Mrs. Reid drove. When she exited the car, after parking it right in front of her house, she saw me and smiled like she always did in my presence. The dark circles under her eyes indicated the lack of sleep she had gotten the previous night. She greeted me and I stood up.

“Hey Kaleb! Didn’t Harriet let you in?” She had no clue about what had happened. Now I didn’t know how to break the news to her. Her eyes watched mine and noticed the sadness in them. “What happened?”

If this were all a movie, this would be the part where the character would realize it all, go into a complete breakdown in slow motion as a sad soundtrack played, and the other character comforted her as the camera faded into the scene of the funeral. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a movie. She knew something had happened, but didn’t know what exactly.

I tried to find my voice deep in my throat, but it came out all coarse and croaked. “Harriet died…” She looked at me, her eyes growing wide in shock. She didn’t utter a word for almost a minute; just stared at my eyes trying to see if I was lying or playing a terrible joke on her. But she couldn’t find it, she only saw my swollen and red eyes and my dead serious expression.

“It can’t be true! She can’t be dead!” Denial. “When? How?” I couldn’t answer, fearing I would become weak again and not contain the tears. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to come to terms with it. I just watched her mom going through every single phase I went through in the few hours I sat with her in her doorstep. She had guessed who killed her, knowing deep down it had been all her mess to begin with. I watched her deny it all, then blame it on herself for not having solved the problem, and then she pushed me away demanding to be alone, and as I walked away from her house, I saw her enter the same phase I was in: depression.

It was lunch time by the time I arrived home. I could smell Anita cooking my favorite meal, but I wasn’t hungry. I went upstairs to my room and closed the door. I put my iPod on shuffle and let it play as I lied down on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

The music escaped my ears. All that I could hear or see was a playback of the many moments I had with Harriet. All those moments I would never have again with her. The kiss in the lake, the laughs we shared watching old comedies, the random waltzes we would do along to themes from musicals, the way she would stare at me as I wrote, her endless questions about my story… So many moments, each one just one more reason to make me weaker.

I closed my eyes, trying to shut off every thought and trying to focus on the music. It was a very laid back, old blues song. It soothed me a bit, until I realized it had been Harriet downloading the song. I sat up and looked at the watch, trying to gain a better perception of time. It was two in the afternoon. I saw the whole mess still in the same place and the music drowning the thoughts in my head. The things I had done that night were a blur to me. I didn’t remember so well how I had made that mess, or the thoughts I had had as I walked home from the hospital.

Walking out of my room and into the kitchen, Anita tried to convince me to eat something for lunch. I was hungry, so I decided to eat a bit. But as soon as I stuck my fork into the meal in front of me, I remembered how Harriet had complimented Anita when she ate the same meal I was about to eat. I just couldn’t eat after that thought. Anita understood me though, as I left the table, the plate still full.

The house was silent, so I could even hear the music coming from my room downstairs. Suddenly, Anita calls my name from the kitchen. I was about to climb back upstairs, but I decided to see what she wanted. “You have one voice message from last night.” She left the kitchen as I approached the telephone. I pressed the button to hear the voice message.

“Kaleb?” There was a pause. “Well I guess you aren’t home, so I might call your cell phone, but I just wanted you to know that if this crazy, stupid idea of mine doesn’t work out, don’t and I repeat, don’t stop going after your dreams and don’t be weak and be afraid to fall in love again. I really love you, and I don’t want you to stop writing or to meet your special person if…”Her voice was nervous and she didn’t want to say it. “If something happens… I just couldn’t stand the threats anymore, so I had to do this. And yes, I know the risks I’m putting myself in… Okay, I’m going to call your cell phone now anyway. Love you.”And the message was over.

I sat there for hours listening to the message. Anita would go inside and do the chores, but I just couldn’t stop hearing the message. As soon as it ended, my finger was already on the button to repeat it. It was the only thing I had left of her voice. My cell phone had deleted the other one automatically.

Anita eventually wrapped her arms around me and said “Harriet wouldn’t like to see you this way.” She did have a point. She removed her arms from around my body and went around me to look at my face to say “When my brother died when I was about your age, I mourned a long time, maybe weeks, and wouldn’t go out of my room at all. But then I realized that life is short, and my brother wouldn’t want me to waste it pouring tears into my pillow. We have to remember all the great deeds they did in their life. It’s remembering the good moments that make us smile and cry at the same time. Death is a hard thing to accept, but time doesn’t wait…” She patted my shoulders.

She was right. She smiled and assured me that she was there if I wanted to talk about it. I still couldn’t smile, but I felt better. Harriet and Anita had that thing in common: both loved life and always seized the day. I looked at the button tempted to hear the message again, but instead I got up and went to my room to get some much needed rest.

I only woke up the following morning. I could still go to school, since I had skipped the day before. But I didn’t really want to go to hear from every single student as I passed the hallway how my girlfriend died. News always spread that fast.

Thinking about what I could do that day except stay at home mopping or go to school to feel worse, only one person came into mind: Travis. I hadn’t seen him since the encounter at the party and for some reason he was the only person I wanted to talk to at that moment.

I reached for my mobile phone and looked in the contacts for his number. I was quite nervous about talking to him, but he was the closest person I had to a friend. “Hey Travis, its Kaleb,” the other side of the line was silent “I know we haven’t really spoken in ages, but could we meet today?”

“Kaleb,” he finally spoke after waiting a while, his voice was rough, I had probably woken him up “yeah, okay. Where?” The only place I could think of that was close to both was a place that held a memory that would make me weak once again.

“At ten by the lake?” He knew which one I referred to. I had gone there once with him. It was at about an hour drive from my house and a two hour drive from his. He waited a bit and was probably checked his watch. It was seven in the morning.

“I’ve got school today… Don’t you have too?” I told him I didn’t want to go, but I suggested meeting in the afternoon before my final session with Dr. Murphy. “Okay, sure. I’ll be there.” I thanked him and went downstairs to eat something. I hadn’t eaten in hours, more than a day actually, so I was famished. Anita hadn’t arrived yet, so I looked in the fridge what there was to eat. There was a chocolate ice cream pint and some chocolate sauce. I decided to eat a chocolate sundae to see if it would help lift my mood.

I grabbed a bowl and a spoon and went over to the living room to watch some TV. I sat down and stretched my legs onto the coffee table in front of me and put the bowl on my lap. Turned the TV on with the remote control and started scooping some ice cream into the bowl. Nothing special was on, so I decided to watch some game shows. I never was a fan of game shows so I didn’t really pay much attention to it and paid more attention to the work of art I was creating. I poured chocolate sauce all over the top of the ice cream and then I scooped some of it into my mouth to judge my creation. It definitely got 10 out of 10 for me. I sank further into the couch as I allowed the ice cream to melt in my mouth.

The rest of the morning wasn’t relevant, I fell asleep, the empty bowl on my lap, and when I woke up it was time to go. I was already driving to the lake, listening to the radio. It wasn’t so long, but I was still hungry and sleepy, so the drive seemed longer than it was.

Eventually, I arrived at the lake, but he didn’t yet. His car was nowhere in sight. I rested my back on my car and tried to hear a car engine roaring in the distance. The trees around me transmitted me their serenity and my mind became less chaotic. He arrived a bit late. He saw me and by my face new something bad had happened. Since when had I become so readable?

“So why did you drag me all the way here?” He approached me as he picked a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. I had once had the habit of smoking, but I quit once I moved. Travis asked if I wanted one but I told him I had quit and he proceeded in saying “You changed a lot…” I nodded and started explaining why I had asked him to meet me.

“I had a girlfriend. She passed away two days ago…” He let out a puff of smoke before looking at me shocked. He asked me how and I replied “Murdered by the guy her mom owed money to. Tried to save her, by taking her to the hospital, but the bullet had hit her heart…” My voice was surprisingly calm compared to how I felt.

“Wow! Wait, you were there?” I nodded and explained everything. I told him the whole story, my voice beginning to lose composure and tears beginning to form at the corners of my eyes. By the end of the story I felt his arms around me saw my tears were dropping onto his navy blue shirt. He stayed silent. That’s what I wanted. Someone to listen to me and comfort me without the use of words, because some people preferred the absence of words: silence.

When I calmed down, we just stood by my car and he said some comforting words. When he felt that words wouldn’t be enough, he went to his car and grabbed two bottles of beer. I hadn’t drunk in a long time, so I accepted drinking one of them. We rested our backs on my car and drank in silence.

I avoided the topic that had been on my mind, since I had vented about it already, and asked how things were going back at my old town. He said that everything was pretty much the same and nothing especial had happened. I didn’t bother asking about my old group of friends, knowing it was a topic neither of us wanted to mention, so I asked something I had been to afraid to ask before: “Have you heard anything about Leonora?” He looked at me and thought on whether to answer that question or not. He opted on telling me.

On the drive back home to go to my last session with Dr. Murphy, too many things hung in my mind. Things I already had and things that Travis had told me. We had parted on good terms: I thanked him for being one of the only friends who still decided to meet me even after I abandoned him and he told me to keep in touch and that he was only a phone call away in case I needed to just talk to someone.

I arrived at her office just in time. I wanted to make this as fast as I could, because I knew what I had to do after. I needed to try to accept it all. I needed to solve my problems in the past. But right now, I needed to come clean about it all with Dr. Murphy, so I wouldn’t keep it all to myself.

She was sitting patiently in her office as usual. I looked at the chaotic peace, the name I had given mentally to the painting in her office, and took a deep breath before sitting. This shall be the end, but I shall start telling the story from the beginning. “Hello Kaleb, how are you feeling today?” She asked. Her notebook was in her lap as usual.

“Not so great. Dr. Murphy, I need to talk about something…” I started.

“Sure, what would you like to talk about?” Her posture became more upright. She had gotten used to my silence, so my sudden willingness to open myself to her caught her interest completely.

“The reason why my parents made me attend these sessions…” Her eyebrows rose indicating me to proceed with my story. “Her name was Leonora…” I told everything that I hadn’t had the chance to tell Harriet but I regret not telling: about how I used to hook up with people and never have a long lasting relationship and how after Leonora I realized that I was destined to be alone, because I couldn’t love anybody which drove me into an alcohol addiction which made my parents pay a shrink to hear my problems. I told her everything that happened in the last forty-eight hours and then I said what I had just found out. “I met my friend Travis today and he told me that Leonora had gotten pregnant, just a few days before I left my old town… She got an abortion. All because of me…” The last bit made me pause a few times, because I was still trying to let the information sink in.

Dr. Murphy heard me patiently, not interrupting me one single time. Some strands of her hair covered her face as she looked at her notebook. She put the notebook aside for the first time and asked “So what do you feel now?” She probably meant how I felt after opening up to someone. It was the first time I had told the whole story, not even Travis or Anita or Harriet had known it all. And for some reason I felt lighter, and not so depressed.

“I feel better…”

She smiled. I thanked her for all the times she heard me and before I left she called my name and said “As humans, we are bound to make some mistakes, but we learn from them. Don’t beat yourself up for your past mistakes; just think about the future and what you can do to make it better.” I smiled and thanked her again, and then left her office for the very last time. Maybe I did find the inner peace I was meant to find. Just like the painter of “chaotic peace” had found peace as he finished his work of art.

I walked home and looked at the sun. Some hope for the future grew in my heart. I was going to combine all the advice I had gotten that day and use it. I was going to go on with my life. I think I may have just come to terms with her death. I won’t probably move on so fast, but acceptance is the first step in moving on and the last phase of grief.

I arrived home and greeted Anita. She asked if I was going to eat dinner and I replied affirmatively. I walked into my room and the mess was gone: the story forever gone; the camera back in the drawer; the pen on my desk. I walked to my computer to see if I received any message. I received one from Eric reminding me that the deadline for the essay was in three days, but he had sent the message two days before, so I only had until that night! I started stressing out. I didn’t have any ideas. I had completely forgotten the article I had to write. I picked up a blank sheet of paper and started brainstorming ideas. I didn’t have anything to talk about.

Suddenly, somebody knocks on the door. I almost jumped, because I was too focused on my article. Anita came in, my old, battered notebook in her hands. ”I found this when I cleaned your room earlier this afternoon, I didn’t know whether to throw it out or not…” I thought and looked at the notebook deciding if I would be better off disposing it at once instead of having to think about it and changing my mind. In the end, the bond I had established with the notebook was too strong to ignore, so I told her to leave it on my bed and I would think what to do with it after.

I continued thinking ideas. My eyes would wander in the notebook’s direction. Every topic seeming unoriginal or cliché. I was tempted to see what was left of my precious city. Idea after idea crossed out on the white sheet of paper. I was tempted to read it, but I resisted. Some actually were good, but didn’t inspire me. I looked at the notebook. No more ideas appeared. I dropped my pencil on the paper and snatched the notebook. Temptation got the best of me.

Only the first pages had remained intact. The ones where I described the city. The ones I had written before I had even met her. The ones that I needed to alter, for example, the Supreme Court wouldn’t appear anymore. I thought it would be irrelevant, because it was just important for the story, not really for the description of the city. For the idea I was forming in my head, the Supreme Court could be included in another group. I would also take out most of the fiction in the description, the things I made out completely, because they once again wouldn’t fit in with my new idea. I could feel words running to the tips of my fingers, not containing themselves, waiting to be written.

I had to write it.

I looked out the window, hoping she would meet my glare wherever she was now, and knew immediately what to write. I picked up the notebook my dad had bought me in Europe. That would be my new writing notebook. A new beginning. I grabbed my pencil and the spirit of the City of Muoia Nell’Aria took control of my hand…