You Are Fatally Invited

by Ande Pliego

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.

Creating written worlds ex nihilo—from nothing—is the closest we get to the divine. Perhaps, in writing, we are divine. But I wonder: what if the page wasn’t the only place we could control fate?

“Sometimes the art of fiction isn’t in how intellectual it is, but how well it makes you actually forget the world around you. Sometimes, binge reading to escape reality can save a person’s life.”

You stole that from me. You’d completely ripped away my ability to write, as if you’d sliced me open and scooped out the creative spark from beneath my rib cage and left me cold and dark. You’d stolen every word I could ever have put on the page, and that hurt most of all.

The man seemed to carry conflict with him like a security blanket, unsure who he was without it.

“Sometimes wounds become scars, not because they’ve healed, but because they’re hiding what’s underneath from ourselves.”

“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.”

My last advice is not to run from pain, nor the people who have caused it. In fact, I highly recommend you keep a little anti-acknowledgments list, as it were, of people you’d love to thank for making life difficult. For making you who you are, whether by spite, defamation, negligence, or indiscretion. What better way to give life to your words, than drawing on your experience?

Vengeance is a poison you consume alongside your victim; the only antidote is reconciliation.