I embarked upon an experimental journey with my words knowing they were my closest tether to reality. The young woman sitting at her keyboard crafting a fictional universe for her most intimate thoughts to occupy was more worn, and far more exhausted, than the young woman she was basing her story on -- herself nine months prior. The global pandemic that has dominated 2020 has undoubtedly warped my conception of time, but I emerged those nine months an entirely different entity. Those nine months were dominated by loss, but the loss that is more difficult to grapple with than the cut-and-dry living/non-living kind. Think instead of the loss that fails to register as loss since if just one circumstance was different, it wouldn’t be loss at all. 

 

With each momentous deprivation from my familiar life, a piece of my body -- my protective outer layer -- was yanked away from me. Eventually, what was left behind was a malleable pile of mush, hopelessly vulnerable like a crab without its shell. It was this woman who sat in front of her laptop, yearning to tell a story that made sense of how everything surmounted to this miserable pile of mush. 

 

Somehow, I got myself in front of a blank screen, and began to hurl harpoons into the world, hoping they would snag onto an ending so sensical, reality would follow fiction’s footsteps. I stood before my loss to look it square in the eye; scrutinizing every square inch of it. As I tossed my words into the void, the story I wanted to tell became more clear. 

 

I decided to venture from my non-fiction roots and dip my toes into a new genre, flash fiction, as I hoped to deviate from my wordy tendencies and shepherd myself into a more mystical form of storytelling.  

 

As I began a more rigorous writing process, I quickly hit a wall. I was attempting to create a concrete story for myself, but I didn’t have an ending. I frantically was searching for the words to build myself a satisfying conclusion, but the ones I was throwing onto the blank Google Doc were too feeble -- I still felt uneasy about the story I was crafting. 

 

Eventually, I settled on the only logical ending to my story: there is not one (yet). I simply chose to represent the middle slice of my journey rather than piece together the entire pie. 

 

Now, I turn to you. I am granting you entry into my real-time processing of loss and the metamorphosis of me to myself. My biggest hope is that clarity will be bestowed upon you, my reader, when you’re feeling lost in a place you’re most familiar. I hope that my words bring you comfort in times when you don’t have an ending, either. 

 

I built myself a shelter of words, and I welcome you into the threshold.