Many Words In Silence

Chapter 7

It all begun with Sam urging me to rewrite the diary and poems I had written to Blake before and after his death. It took me more than a year to be able to face them, but as part of my therapy I did it. After that I put the manuscript away where nobody would ever find it, until Sam actually did. He was the one sending it in to publishers without me knowing and when the letter arrived that a publishing house had accepted my book you could have knocked me over with a feather. I knew that Sam was behind it. Who else would it have been?

It took a lot of convincing from Sam, but eventually I felt comfortable enough to allow the book to be published under a pen name. A year later I followed up with another book, also about a young guy grieving the dead loss of his life.

Three months after the second book came out I was on the New York Bestseller list. The New Yorker called my book; "The saddest tragedy in book form since Romeo and Juliet." It made me feel good. It made me feel like I was again in a way with Blake. Holding our love in my hands, printed in a real book made me feel closer to him. But then depression struck again as my name leaked out and every magazine, blog, vlog, and newspaper was printing pictures my face next to Blake. Telling the terrible story of my murdering mother and father, the latter who was serving a life sentence in prison. It all spiralled down from there. I wasn't a good author anymore. People weren't buying the book to read about the innocent love that was taken away too soon. Now they were buying a book with hopes of finding out some terrible juicy details that the papers might have missed out on.

I couldn't write again after that. Not even if it was for Blake. I just couldn't do it anymore. It was too tragic. And a few months later I followed it up with something even more tragic. I tried to kill myself – again. That time Michael found me and not Sam. But then again, there was the time after that where Sam found me again. And the time where Lucy found me. It would have all worked out. I could have joined Blake a long time ago if it wasn't for them, babysitting me. The worse was probably when I found out that Sam was tracking my phone wherever I went for a solid four years. I felt betrayed. I didn't try to kill myself that time. I just wept on Blake's grave, hoping that somehow the earth would open up and swallow me, allowing me to rest on top of the box that held the last remains of my first true love.

Silent beloved, I wrote on the paper that Timothy had brought me. I could see him standing a few tables away, watching my every move, but I ignored him.

Your tears still linger in my neck where you spilled them all those years ago. It has not been an easy ride, but here I am in the place that hatched you into existence. The portal that allowed you to walk into this broken world of sorrow and eternal loneliness.

They may bicker and cry, but no amount of fearless bravery would ever bring you back into this world. Not even when you are looking at me through the eyes of another. Not even when the other could be the portal back to you that is destined to take my life from me in order to reunite a unity that was never meant to be.

I stopped. Running my eyes over the words I knew it was something I could work on. Something that could potentially be publishing material, although I knew that nobody apart from me would ever have the pleasure to read these words. Sometimes you need to put certain things behind you and move on. Sometimes the price you have to pay in order to keep food on the table is too much to bear.

"What are you writing?"

I looked up at Timothy, wondering why he would ask that and why he wasn't busy busting tables, but as I looked around there was only one other table with an old lady reading a magazine with a cup of tea in her hand.

"Just stuff..." I answer slowly watching for his reaction. Wondering if I had just given myself away to be the E. Blake, author of Ever After, Full of Tears and When Time Didn't Heal.

"I also write. Just stuff. It's probably stupid, mostly. It's just like songs and poems," Timothy said. I wondered if he was still trying to get me to fix him up with Fynn.

"That's great. Hold out. Maybe you could make something out of it one day. Maybe you could get published," I said with a smile. That's what most teens want to hear. That even though they are doing the very same thing as every other second teen, theirs were the most promising and they would make it, even though I was ready to bet that poor Timothy would probably be the manager of the hell hole in a few years, staying in his childhood home until he was 40 and starting his midlife crisis. The big dreams only seemed to happen to those who didn't really want it in the first place, and never those who were seeking it from the beginning.

"Nah... I don't want to publish. It's more to just get my thoughts out. It drives me crazy sometimes. The things I think. Sometimes writing them down just kinda help, you know?" he said nodding his head at the piece of paper in front of me.

Somehow I could see pain inside the kid. He was being honest. Somewhere in him there was a little part of me. Maybe this is what it meant when they said that we were all connected to each other in some way. Maybe it was that moment where we saw something of ourselves in others that created that illusion.

"I write about my boyfriend who died," I said, looking him in the eye and watching his reaction.

It wasn't the reaction I would've normally got. Normally people would have said sorry. They would have pretended to be extremely sorry for you, asking you how it happened, wanting to get the juiciest detail so that they could convince themselves that their lives weren't so bad. That there was someone worse off than them in the world. Thoughts that would haunt them at night with guilt as they realise that they love to hear about the misfortune of others in order to make themselves feel better about themselves.

"Can I sit down?" Timothy asked, although he nervously looked over his shoulder towards the manager that was busy reading a book behind the counter.

"Sure," I answered, seeing tears in the kids eyes.

"Your story is fucked up. Your boyfriend dying is fucked up. I know you probably don't want to hear this, but I don't think it will get better. So I hope that writing everything down brings you a bit of sanity," Timothy said as his eyes started to water up in front of me.

And right there in a coffee shop where I never intended to be I got what I had been looking for all this time. I got someone who truly understood. Who said the words that you needed to hear even if they were hard.

"You're not as young and innocent as you look, are you?" I asked him, resisting the urge to touch his hand and comfort him.

"Nope. I have seen some things that nobody should see in this lifetime," he said as he scraped his chair back over the floor, stood up and walked to the old lady with her tea and magazine, gesturing for him to bring the bill.