What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Packing up my house to move, I found a waterlogged old journal in the bottom of my desk; something I haven’t looked at in years. The pages were partially stuck together, but when I gently prised them open, they flipped to something I didn’t realise I still had: the suicide note I wrote when I was fifteen. It’s dated 11 July, 2003, which makes today less than a fortnight shy of its sixteen year anniversary.

I won’t share the contents of it here, for obvious reasons. But holding that journal, I can almost touch the ghost of the girl who wrote those words, and put my hand over hers. I think backwards through time and say to her her: Right now, our five-year-old son is playing with his dragon Lego; we just took his paintings off the fridge together and saved them to take to our new house, in a new country. There’s a shelf nearby filled with author’s copies of all the books we’ve written. Things still hurt sometimes, but you made it this far. We’ll make it further together.

Please live, even if you’re hurting. Things change; they get better; sometimes they get more complicated, too, but life is only static when it ends. Late at night, I used to lie in bed and ask myself, What happens next? It was how I made myself want to stay, and it’s why my blog has the title it does. What happens next? You only find out if you hang around. Every second that we’re alive, we’re time travellers exploring the future, waving back at the people we were in the past and helping them fowards.

I’m thirty-two years old, and I’m alive.    

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