my heart

As I've already mentioned, I'm participating in a writing challenge called NaNoWriMo. Its meant to motivate writers to write a novel in a month (50,000 words in 30 days). If I ever want to be a career author, I have to learn to produce quickly. So this is me trying. So far, so good. Staying on goal. It helps to have a story that means so much to me.

As many of you know, I had a boyfriend that died when I was sixteen. I struggled for many years with depression, weighed down by the heavy weight of grief. It will be fifteen years this June since his death and up until a couple years ago I still mourned the loss of him. That's not to say I don't still, but what I was experiencing wasn't healthy. I didn't talk to many people about it because I didn't see it as a problem.

When I was approaching my twenty-ninth birthday, I went into a near panic over the loss of my twenties and how much of the decade I had wasted. I realized that I let the memory of Andy overwhelm my life. I had used him as a scapegoat, as an excuse for my bitterness, for my depression. I realized I had built his memory up in my mind, made it into something bigger than it ever was. And I got to the point where I said enough is enough. Not any more.

So when I received a message from a friend on March 6th saying it was Andy's birthday, I was happy. I had forgotten and that had made me so happy that tears came to my eyes. I knew that I had finally moved on. I began to think back on him, realistically and not through the rose colored glasses I had worn. He would have been thirty-three. Hard to imagine, since he's forever frozen at the age of eighteen. I began to imagine what he would have been like if he hadn't died on that Sunday afternoon.

He had always been obnoxious, stubborn, hard-headed. I had just chosen to forget those things. We fought all the time. Were apart more than we were together. He was a great guy, an amazing Christian, but the more I thought about it the more I realized he was a sucky boyfriend. We were awful together. We never would have lasted like I had imagined.

With my new found clarity I realized I had a story to write. Not about Andy, although he has greatly influenced it. But my story. The story of my journey past grief and bitterness. My story of pain and loss. My wake up call and long overdue growth.

My characters are only influenced by the emotions I once felt. The story pure fiction, but its a play on my favorite game "What if..." Too often we play that game, living in the past, wondering about the future, considering the possibilities. It's a fun game, but sometimes dangerous. Just as my main character has found. She believes her dreams have been stolen from her, her only chance at true love stripped from her. If only he hadn't died, she would be happy. They would be happy. Life would be perfect. She gets a taste of that life and realizes it isn't all she imagined it would be.

So as thunder rumbles around me, clouds threaten rain, and the sound of acoustic guitar plays from my Pandora station, I write. I write my heart, my pain. I write about what I thought were shattered dreams. And as I write, I fulfill my new dreams.