About Me

​​In the Discworld series by Sir Terry Pratchett, Death exists simultaneously in the physical and the surreal. He has his own dedicated plane within dimensions, and this is where his house sits. Within his house, one of the rooms (I use the term loosely as the house doesn’t exist in 3-dimensional space) is an endless library. In this library are the books of every life ever lived, some still writing themselves with a soft whisper, others silent in their conclusions.
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Sometimes I wonder what my book looks like.

​       It would be a hard cover, but if you looked you’d see that the jacket would still be fairly new. In the past years I’ve gone from separated to single into being a mom and a wife. The career I thought I would have stopped working, and I've embarked on some pretty terrifying waters since the start of 2018. The new jacket has a couple of small nicks and tears, but it looks good.

       If you look under the jacket you'll see the torn scraps from the old jackets that stuck to the cover from when they were glued on to hold the book together when it nearly tore apart. There would be a lot of dented edges because it was dropped by a lot of people, and there would be a few spots where the original leather was worn clear through from being handled roughly, not to mention the gouges and scratches and frayed, loose binding. Look closer, though, and you’d see the fresh repairs and new stitching that was applied with care.
       Inside, the pages would be mismatched and everything would be handwritten. The writing starts off uniform and tidy, the odd hitch and off-color page from childhood injuries and hurts. Around eleven years old, the pages and the writing would start to become erratic. The papers would start to be jaggedly cut and the colors would darken, stained by ink splotches from too much pressure on the pen that would be followed by hard slashes to the next page.

       My book would tell you about my back problems that started on those jagged pages, and the spiral that followed in the next few years into other injuries and chronic pain. It would tell you about a teenage addiction to painkillers and an eating disorder that continued into my early twenties and flares back into my life even in my late thirties. It would tell you about hope from unexpected places, conditions on the supposedly unconditional, and ways to dream in spite of nightmares. It would tell you about taking the time to live in the moment.
       For two thirds of my book, you’d see a pattern of self-destruct clearly in the colors of the pages that fluctuated between the day-to-day whites and pastels of the mundane and the violent and dark shades of pain and anger – three times fading into grays so dark that you couldn’t see the ink on the page without squinting.
​       The ink itself would be black, stark and honest because you can’t lie in your own book. Between the black lettering, there would be small parts written in colors that make your head hurt and your eyes swim. Those parts would appear on the darkest pages, and the whitest, sometimes as just a letter here and there, other times as whole sentences. Those parts would make it clear to anyone reading why I believe without question in higher powers. Those parts would be the ones that have inspired me to live so that other’s belief in me isn’t wasted, and make it possible that I’m still here and alive. Those would be the parts that brought the people to me who cared enough to repair the cover, not just patch it or carelessly glue on another ill-fitting jacket. Those parts would be what held my book together and kept it strong enough to move to a new shelf beside my husband.

The pages written lately would have a lot brighter colors to them, despite a few dark chapters that are thankfully a lot shorter than the earlier ones. There would be a lot more laughter in my story now, too.

       The new shelf for my book would be solid and dry, and between mine and my husband's would be two new, slim volumes. There’d be room on this shelf for growth, to add friends and new family as they come through our lives, and the new jackets on our books wouldn’t look out of place here.
       The stories inside would be what has happened, not what will happen, because that part wouldn’t be written yet. There would be room in the bindings for a lot of new pages to be added, though, and space on the shelf to add them.

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