With a Heavy Heart

She wanted to write fiction. Fantasy, sci-fi...anything else. But all she could write was her truth. All that connected her to the world, to others, seemed to be her pain. That story about being a young girl, her mind so much more developed than her body, and her friend's father...touching her in ways that made her feel strange. Confused and hurt yet not hurting. Not at first, anyway. That was popular.

And then the story about the boy in high school. Who followed her to her afterschool babysitting job. Touching her in that same way, but rougher, more insistent. Who did things to her that she had learned about in health class. She told her mother, and her mother made her quit her job. The guilt and shame...it never went away. That story was popular also.

In fact, all the stories about her body being used, abused. Beaten and brutalized. All of those stories were popular. It hurt so much to write them. It was confusing how people enjoyed reading them. As if she hadn't lived them. As if they hadn't been real. And maybe, that was exactly the problem. Maybe it all sounded made-up. Like fiction. So people transformed her tragedy to her creativity in their minds.

But every word was real. And she lost the desire to feel. So she lost the desire to write. She couldn't write anything else...the only thing that wanted to be released was her sadness. Her emptiness. Her lonliness. Her desolation.

After a while, her tears stopped forming words. Her mind stopped trying to process the pain. But she kept living through story after story. When she was writing, the experience was like a bullet to the heart and the story...that was the exit wound. Once she stopped writing, she was still getting shot...but now there was no exit wound. They lived inside, infecting her. Brought her to the point of no return.

The last thing she ever wrote was her suicide note.

"With a heavy heart, we gather here today..."