I am writing, and I am writing with my head on my knees, eyes squeezed shut, fingers trembling over the keyboard. But the words are leaking out, one after the other. I can look away, and I can pretend that someone else is making this happen, but it’s not true. This story, these characters, these events, they are all things I have made with my own typing and my own hands. My words. These tears squeeze into the folds of my skirt, and although my eyes are still shut tight my mind cannot turn away from the picture I’m creating of this girl following someone she trusts to a room with a knot of evil in it, waiting to break her into pieces and make her into a thing they can sell.
I did not create the situation, because that is based on fact, and this makes it all the worse to push forward and make the next thing happen that I know has to happen and that I pray will somehow not happen. Somehow the plot will twist some other way, somehow my precious character will be spared, somehow this issue will go away and so I won’t to break hearts about it anymore. And it is because I write it this way, clenching my stomach, weeping into my knees, shaking with rage and sorrow, it is because I write this way that God gave me this vocation and this cause and this heart. The issue is there, the girls are real, and the hearts are still hard and unknowing. So I keep writing.