No. I feel you next to me. Nitpicking. Berating. Scowling. I know that I'm emotionally over having you in my life but that doesn't stop my brain from remembering what life used to be like, what my writing used to be like.
My characters were cute, gullible, adorable. My prose was satisfactory at best.
But, now that you're gone, I've grown. I'm not going to say that I'm jaded or hurt, those wounds healed long ago, now I'm dealing with the aftermath of it all. How you've affected me deep down into my very fiber of being.
I feel like there is something I have to prove, if not to myself, but to you. You always dragged me down and stopped me from living up to my potential, but you lifted me up when I was down on the ground and beaten by my own insecurities.
I don't know whether I should thank you, whether my writing should thank you...
I guess in the end we're all left with this choice. What you put me through woke me up to the real world and potentially helped me save lives, so I guess that alone says "thank you." But that doesn't mean that I accept what happened and that it was okay. It wasn't. It never will be.
All of the plots that you helped me birth have laid unfinished at my finger tips, waiting for me to finally find the courage to read through and complete them. Aching for me to sit in a dark room for 9 hours to produce 30 pages at a time.
Just like the old days.
I don't know if I have the courage to tell them that I'm not the same person anymore, I'm not the same author anymore. That I am not the one to finish telling their tale.
Now I'm just left with this aching hole in my soul where those stories used to lie, along with one glaring question: Do I let the old me die and immerse fully in what I've become?
