The Roughest Draft

by Emily Wibberley

When Nathan leaves the room, his features hard, I collapse onto the bed. The instant he closes the door, I let everything I’m feeling wash over me. It is not refreshing, like the ocean on summer days. It’s more like when unexpected waves hit you right in the face—suddenly you’re underwater, spinning, currents pummeling you from every direction. Flat on the bed, I’m breathless. I’m confused and hating the confusion.

‘Forever’ is about . . .” He grows contemplative, grasping for the distinction. “Forever is about reaching into the future, into years far away and unknowable. ‘Always’ is about every second of every day. It’s as far-reaching as ‘forever,’ it just starts sooner.” His eyes have fixed on mine. “The word is immediate and immortal. And better.”

“But Katrina, you can’t just pretend feelings that are inconvenient don’t exist,”

Four years apart and yet we know each other in ways no one else does. Wasn’t this inevitable? We’ve served the sentence for a crime we never committed. Why shouldn’t we commit it now? There are no possible consequences left.

Imagine how different our lives would be if you could speak your feelings instead of only writing them.

When I see her, one emotion finally overpowers the others in me. It’s heartache. Not for myself—for her. I remember staring down the end of my marriage, standing exactly where she is, looking into the future and the past simultaneously from the place where they split. Whatever my hidden hopes and wishes, what Katrina’s going through is not happy.

She starts to laugh. Then everything catches up to her. I watch the realizations pummeling her, one on top of the next. Her entire vision of her life, vanished. The knowledge that this person she used to see nearly every day would become one she’d only speak to under the harshest of necessary circumstances. Her posture sags, not much—just enough that I know some spark sustaining her has gone out. She drops down onto the edge of the bed, and her eyes glaze over. I stand, helpless. I want to tell her she’ll be okay, that she’ll feel like her life has fallen apart, but she can choose every piece with which she reassembles it. I want to tell her she deserves love she never had with Chris.

Fiction comes from truth. It is a wonderful, imaginative, flourishing thing grown from a seed of real feelings, real desires, real fears. No artist ever creates from nothing. We work from what we’ve experienced, inspired by the unique piece of the world we see. It’s why art cannot be replicated.

What I’ve been feeling this summer was, I realize, just the ominous pull of the current. Now I’m swept off my feet. Sucked out into very deep water. The future is overwhelming, suddenly here, daunting and mine to lose. And I’m thrashing furiously under the surface, not sure which way is shore. And I’m scared.

Because the true, true horror, the one seemingly no one realizes but me, is that once you have your dreams, all you have left is the chance to lose them. It’s inevitable.

“Here’s what you really don’t want to hear,” he goes on. “What we have is a fairy tale. It is a dream come true. And it’s imperfect. I wish you could understand it can be both. Fiction is fiction and it’s real. They’re not opposites. They live within each other.” His voice is raw, his expression naked. While anger is the fire in him, I recognize pain is the kindling. “The worst part is, I think you love me, too. I think you know we’re soul mates. But we’ll never be together as long as you’re afraid of your own happiness.”

Everyone talks up the proposal. Not enough is made of whatever this is. The preproposal. It’s wonderful in its ordinariness. Proposals are for candlelit dinners and champagne. Preproposals are for sidewalk conversations and running late. They’re one of the small moments you don’t find in stories—only in real life.

We’ve written the rough draft of our love together, the draft with loose ends, unfinished edges, mistakes every other page. But every writer knows there’s magic in revision, where your work changes from a manuscript into a book. Where intentions, emotions, missed connections coalesce into something complete. It’s where what you mean to say becomes what you have said. The characters deepen, the details shine, the prose sparkles. Suddenly, from nothing, you find your story.

I love even our roughest draft. I love every fraught page we’ve rewritten to get to here. Because in the end, the best part of a love story isn’t having it. It’s getting to keep writing.