Chapter 35 Allegories
Iknew this would happen. The moment my laptop disappeared with Em back into Novella, I knew she’d come back to me.
It’s such a headache, being a writer; the self-doubts plus that euphoria of creative adrenaline mixed with the humbling sensation of imposter syndrome. The exhaustion of imagining more than you can put into words.
Now Em knew what it was like to be caught within the chaos of my mind.
She already lives at the mercy of my fingertips as they click away at my keyboard right now; everything she experienced, we lived through together.
But when she stole the manuscript from me, a wall went up in my brain.
Writer’s block. It left me aimlessly staring out my apartment windows, feeling purposeless, all while I knew deep down inside, Em was falling apart faster than I would ever be able to edit or revise her.
Entire universes just sit in my mind all day, and somehow, I’m expected to focus on acting like a normal human being.
My soul belongs in a field of wildflowers, somewhere without pollution, where I can wield a sword in a lavish dress, fighting for the greater good.
But my body is stuck working a job to just make the bills go away each month and stressing over my grad-school grades.
I’ve always been too much, yet never enough.
Maybe I created such a broken character because I’m such a broken person myself.
Gosh. You should see me crying right now.
I’m so anxious about letting this story out into the world, exposing myself under the eyes and expectations of so many potential readers.
Or maybe, after I publish this book, it will result in that nightmare I have where there won’t even be any readers at all.
My darkest fear is that my words, feelings, worlds, and characters rooted so deeply within my soul really never meant anything in the end.
After all, none of my other stories ever got anywhere.
Around thirty notebooks full of my tiny-handwriting sits collecting dust in my desk drawers.
Millions of wasted words lost in a sea of rejections from corporate professionals who think they know better than me about how my writing ought to be; only ever concerned about making a buck, not about the stories they read.
But if I could reach just one person—if I could somehow get one laugh—one moment of joy so someone else could escape this dreary life or share the universes within my mind, then I’d be complete.
Forgive me for journaling my vulnerability right now in the middle of your late-night escapism read. I just need to get this out somehow. This is my story after all. No matter what Em thinks.
But as I said, I knew she’d come back to me…
Em’s green eyes were full of tears like mine when our eyes met.
It was dark outside, the end of a long, weary weekend for me. Winter had begun creeping to life in the crawling fingers of frost along my windowsills. But everything in my reality faded away in the edges of my watery vision except for Em.
Our combined chaos of words was tattooed across her face and arms, my rant on the previous page shifting across her furrowed brow.
“I tried,” Em wept. She pulled Inky out of her dress pocket. The broken quill-pen morphed back into my stolen laptop within her hands. Cracks and dents covered the space gray surface, no thanks to Sasha.
“I know,” I said.
Em fell onto her knees, covering her face with her hands. Her shoulders shook; I almost reached out to lay a palm on them, but I hung back beside my gray sofa, unable to do anything else but stare.
I had made this wreck of a girl. And honestly, she looked a lot like how I did at her age—alone, broken, anxious, desperate to be wanted—convinced she was never doing enough to be enough to matter enough.
“I just wanted to be in an original story,” Em sobbed, smearing her tears across her face.
The bitter scene rolling out around us formed along her cheekbones, the words tattooed across her skin shifting with the plot. “
My whole life, I tried everything I could to achieve my dreams of seeing my name in a book,” she said. “I went to a good school and got good grades and never associated with stereotypical characters and—and none of it fucking mattered.”
She shot me a salty glare, which, I’ll admit, I’d deserved.
“And when I tried to change the tropes and clichés, it just got worse.” Em beat her fist against the beige carpet, ears reddening.
I slowly approached her, kneeling across from her. Our knees almost touched; mine in Christmas pajama pants and hers underneath her pooling, torn skirts.
“Em, you were always good enough for me,” I said the words I wished someone would’ve told me.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.” I risked taking her cold, trembling hands.
My pulse rushed at her touch. “I tried to tell you when you broke the FOURTH WALL to steal the story. Before that, I sent you those visions. I even tried twice to communicate with you through Faylorn—both in his death note and as a ghost. You don’t have to force yourself to become something you’re not just to achieve your dreams, Em. ”
“If I’m not original,” Em tugged against my grip, but I tightened, refusing to let her go again. “Then what’s the damn point? If I’m suffering through a questline of tropes,” she wrinkled her nose, “then what’s the point? Who’s going to want a book like that?
I licked my lips, letting the truth come out. “I do.”
Em’s mouth opened then closed with a snap.
“I wanted that book, so I wrote that book,” I said. “It’s not about the results; it’s about the process. You’re just so caught up in what will happen when the story’s over, you can’t even enjoy it as it’s happening in front of you.”
Her green eyes averted, focused on my dry hands.
Each of my perfectly anxiety-picked hangnails stared back at her.
Between our interlocked fingers, the words on her knuckles shifted with my thoughts and our exact conversation.
Em’s eyebrows raised, now aware that her tattoos had been changing all along.
“I put you on a questline for the fun of it,” I went on. “I created you to ruin that story. I mean, it was never meant to go to the extreme extent that you took it, but that’s irrelevant at this rate. I set you up so you could make the plot your own.”
“You did?” she sniffled.
“Yes!” I let out a hollow laugh. “That was the whole point! I fell out of love with writing, so I wanted to see what a strong, crazy, smart character like you would do if we went against the script. Together. Every Great Author must try to be as original as possible, just like our Main Characters. We’re expected to market ourselves as these geniuses to people who barely give us half a crap in return.
So, I wanted to try to reconnect with my passions, I wanted to let the story take charge for once. ”
“You did a shitty job at that,” Em muttered.
“We both did,” I said.
The slightest twitch at the corner of her mouth told me she’d nearly smiled.
“Neither of us can do this alone, Em.” I held up our joined hands.
“You’re the Main Character I needed so I could reconnect with myself as a writer and heal my inner child.
You helped patch my broken dreams; I need to write because I love it, not because of anyone else’s expectations.
I write because it’s who I am. Meanwhile, I’m your author.
You need me to hold your world and story together as you get to go out and experience these crazy, awesome adventures.
Did I ever mention that I’m totally jealous of you, by the way? ”
“You … are?” Em’s eyes finally met mine.
“Yes!” I chuckled at the confused creases forming along her forehead. “My world is nothing like yours. It’s why I write… so I can escape it and lose myself in my own imagination.”
“And my life absolutely fucking sucks,” Em retorted. “Because you won’t give me what I want.”
“What do you want, Em Smith?” I asked my Main Character.
“I want to be in a book. A real book. One that people read and love and relive my adventures through. Just like my parents,” Em said, stiffening. But she didn’t let her hands go from mine. “And I want to go on many adventures that are original and interesting.”
“You already have that,” I said.
“No, I don’t.” Her eyes practically shot daggers out of their green irises at me. “This one is damn cliché.”
“Em, you are a Main Character already. And with all the chaos you just ensued, it is an original story,” I argued.
And as I half preached at her, I’ll admit I was also lecturing myself.
“What you want is wired in you already because it’s what you need.
What you’re good at is already a part of who you are, and that’s why it’s what you succeeded.
You’re too hard on yourself to recognize the incredible, disastrous mess you created. ”
“You really think that cliché plot is good enough to become a book?” Em scoffed.
“Don’t you?” I asked. “Our meeting like this, you breaking the FOURTH WALL, this whole story… nothing either of us did was a mistake or accident. This plot is for you. It’s for both of us. It’s who we need to be. And if you let it, it’s going to be the start of who we are, together.”
“What if they don’t accept me?” Em’s voice cracked.
“Who?” I blinked. “Your Side Characters? Girl, we can make them do whatever you want. Your Author? Well, I’m pretty sure she just used her evening to try to support you.”
“No.” Em looked up. She looked right at you beyond the page. A spark of hope mixed with dread sat in the lump in her chest. “The readers.”
I fought to find the words, but even authors sometimes struggle to say or write the correct things.
“What if they can’t forgive me?” she asked both you and me. “What if they don’t read or like our story?”
“Does it matter?” I responded past the thinning in my voice.
A pinch of anxiety soured my mouth, and I struggled to swallow it down.
I squeezed her hands in mine. “Maybe we’ve got this all wrong.
Maybe instead of worrying about publishing, and readers, and results, we should just focus on each other? ”
“I just wanted to see my story on paper,” Em said.
“So did I.”
“Will we ever get that?” my Main Character asked me.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, letting out a tense breath. “But no one said we have to sacrifice what we both love in the name of success.”
Silence hung between us; a meditative pause as we pondered on the reality at play. If we wanted to finish this story, we had to do it together. No matter the outcome, the book couldn’t exist without both of us.
Em’s eyes darted between my crumpled laptop, our hands, and me. Her calculating silence brewed between us.
No matter how hard I tried to literally read the words spreading across the scowl of her face, I couldn’t decipher her mind. In the privacy of my perspective, these thoughts were hers and hers alone to have. It didn’t matter what she thought. Nor what she felt. It wasn’t your business or mine.
After everything, I guess she deserved that much.
“Okay,” was all Em said.
“Okay,” I said back. A sliver of warmth swelled between our clasped hands. In the acceptance of a truce, a joint sensation of peace rose between us.
The sprawling words across Em’s arms, face, neck, and hands faded away. Draining like the self-doubts in my chest. Her lashes fluttered as she examined herself, relief flushing across her cheeks.
“Everything I did…” Em turned her palms over repeatedly, wiggling her fingers with a grin, her skin her own again. “Stealing the story and trying to rewrite the plot… was that a waste of my time?”
“No.” I snorted. “You literally did what you set out to do: you made the story original.”
“Really?” Her eyebrows perked up.
“Really, really,” I promised.
“What’s left to do?” Em smoothed her disaster of a dress.
“You need to complete the prophecy and kill Kriqir,” I said. “Then retake the Cursed-But-Once-Uncursed-Tower so that you can embrace becoming the Almighty Queen of Stars and Princess of the White Rose Valley.”
Em flinched.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” I couldn’t help but laugh at her distaste for all those awful, cliché titles. My fingers ached at the traumatic notion of how much work it took me to type each title out. “But it’s like the others have said, the quest cannot end until you complete the prophecy.”
“I want to decide how this ends,” Em said.
“Okay.”
“No,” she interrupted me. “I want to be the one who determines how and when this damn book ends. If I’m going to be at the mercy of your nonsense, at least grant me control of when it’s over.”
I chewed on her request for a moment.
“Fine,” I nodded. “But only if you understand that I can’t give Inky back to you.”
“Besides teleportation, that pen wasn’t very helpful anyway,” Em wrinkled her nose.
“Nope. No, it is not.” I laughed again.
I pulled myself back onto my uneasy legs, the prickle of blood circulation returning to my toes. I offered her a hand and helped Em stand. She brushed herself off, her green eyes surveying my apartment like she was finally allowing herself the freedom of accepting my humanity.
“I do need help with one more thing before I send you back to Novella, though,” I said. “Just make sure you see how important this prophecy is.”
“Will I like it?” Em asked.
I couldn’t hold back my grin. “I think you will.”