You Are Fatally Invited

by Ande Pliego

We’ve all done things in the dark, after all.

Writing is a kind of beautiful madness. It is slitting yourself open, bleeding your soul onto the page in that paradoxical mask of vulnerability perhaps only a writer can achieve. And writing fear requires the greatest vulnerability of all: a willingness to face your demons, and set them free.

Dramatic hair decisions were rarely without catalyst, and I couldn’t help but wonder what hers had been.

When would I stop getting burned by the people I trusted the most?

“I think in everyone’s life,” I started slowly, “you get an event that cuts everything in two. Like an axe splitting wood. And there becomes a before and an after.”