The chill of the January wind bit at my cheeks, a sharp reminder of the world outside the echoing chamber of my mind.
"I'm sorry for your loss."
The words, worn smooth by repetition, grated against my raw nerves.
Each new face, each sympathetic voice, delivered the same hollow phrase, a mantra of pity I couldn't escape.
I stood in the park, listening to the city's soft hum… vendors calling, leaves rustling, distant traffic murmuring.
A stark contrast to the cacophony within me.
Louder, even. Much louder.
It had been a month since I'd returned to this country, the very place where my youth had once blossomed, where every corner held a memory of hope, vibrancy, and the exhilarating sense of new beginnings. And for a month, I'd been living with the stark, brutal reality of… well, of what was no longer.
Perhaps the universe, in its enigmatic wisdom, had decided that motherhood was not yet my path.
My jaw clenched, and I forced a breath into my lungs, but it brought no solace.
Shit.
The familiar ache settled in my chest, heavy and persistent.
TWO MONTHS LATER
"How's work, my love?" His voice, a gentle inquiry, barely pierced the fog of my apathy.
"The usual crap." The words were sharper than I intended, laced with a bitterness that had become my constant companion.
"Come on. Not that tone again." A weary sigh followed, and I didn't blame him.
I'd been impossible lately.
The miscarriage had stripped me bare, leaving me to navigate the world as if walking on broken glass, barefoot and bleeding, daring anyone to push me further. He had every reason to walk away, and I wouldn't have faulted him if he did.
I was a jagged edge, impatient and hollowed out. My fuse had vanished, my drive was missing in action, and my smile was a pale, spectral imitation of what it once was.
Hope?
I couldn't even tell if it still resided within me.
In the deepest silence of the night, when the world surrendered to sleep, a voice would stir within me. Dark, persuasive, and eerily calm, it whispered insidious suggestions: just let go. Stop fighting. End the ache once and for all.
Fuck.
I fought it.
I truly did.
But it always returned, again and again. And the worst part? I let it stay. I let it linger, longer.
For far too long.
**
That night, the apology trembled from my lips, a fragile whisper of honesty threatening to crumble under its own weight. My husband's silence was profound, his gaze deep, the kind that seeks to penetrate the carefully constructed cracks in one's facade.
We talked.
Really talked.
No distractions, no sarcastic quips, no tired sighs.
Just two people on the living room floor, cold coffee between us, and the soft, clinging guilt of unspoken words.
I laid bare the wilderness of my soul, the profound sense of being lost, the emptiness that had devoured my days. I confessed my fear, the paralyzing dread that joy might forever elude me. He listened, his presence a comforting anchor. When I finished, he reached for my hand, his grip gentle yet firm.
"Maybe," he suggested, his voice soft, "you could try again. Not with everything at once. Just… try the things you used to love. Writing. Drawing. Drumming. Baking. Even if you think it's all bullshit now. Maybe some of it isn't."
A dry, bitter laugh escaped me, yet a strange warmth flickered within the chest I had believed to be turned to ice. For reasons I couldn't articulate, his suggestion seized me like a storm tide.
Loud, sudden, and utterly consuming.
Later that night, I retrieved my old Acer notebook from the bottom of a plastic bin. The plastic had yellowed slightly with age, but the machine, after a few groans, hummed to life, as if it had been patiently awaiting my return all these years.
And there it was. A folder, unequivocally labeled "WRITINGS – DO NOT OPEN (CRINGE)." My finger hovered, then clicked. Forty-three drafts greeted me, scattered like forgotten relics in a digital time capsule. Messy shonen-inspired fantasy plots, the embryonic stages of a detective series, a slice-of-life story set in a ramen shop, and a painfully explicit novel born from the trashiest smut manga I used to binge. I even discovered a folder ominously titled "poetry haha pls forgive meeey."
I smiled at that.
Eight years of writing.
Eight years of something I loved, abandoned after my mastectomy, exiled into digital obscurity as if it had no place in this new, broken version of womanhood.
The tears, unbidden, ugly, came anyway.
Silently at first, then in heavy drops that splattered onto the laptop keys. I laughed through them, salty and stunned. Then, I stumbled upon the folder containing my old digital drawings. They were awful. Sloppy lines, anatomically questionable hands, faces capable of conveying, at most, three expressions. But they were mine. Fugly, yes, but undeniably proud, unfinished, a raw testament to the version of me who dared to create regardless.
The tears intensified, a torrent I couldn't stem. Before I could catch my breath, I heard his footsteps pounding up the stairs. He burst into the room, took in my tear-streaked face, and said nothing. He simply knelt beside me, pulling me into his arms. I clung to him, as if the world had cleaved open, and his warmth was all that remained.
**
The next morning, before work, I dared to try something different. I baked. A simple cake recipe, one I half-remembered from an old YT tutorial. Predictably, I burned it. But my husband, with exaggerated flair, scraped off the crispy edges and declared it gourmet. We laughed until our ribs ached.
Then, I picked up my stylus again, opening my dusty drawing app. My lines were shaky, but my hands remembered more than I expected. It was as if a part of my body had been patiently awaiting permission to move again. I posted the result on an art page. Felt accomplished. Felt… somehow alive again.
That night, I set up my old electric drum kit, the TD-82 Ringway, which had been gathering dust for years. The pads were grimy, but when I struck them, they responded without hesitation. I played slowly at first, wrists stiff, but then the rhythm returned. My body remembered the beat, and my soul leaned into the glorious noise.
I wrote that night too. Continuing one of my old novels. Polished it. One chapter. Then another. It became a sacred habit. After work, during lunch breaks, sometimes in the middle of the night, fueled by coffee and eye bags, with soft music playing in the background. To my utter shock, I finished it. A short, novella romance. Slice of life. Baking. Sex. A little trauma for flavor. I loved it. It was strange and messy, nothing like what I imagined "real" writers created, but it was undeniably mine. I uploaded it to KDP, hit publish, and stared at the confirmation screen as if I had just launched a part of my soul into orbit. I even incorporated some of my old drawings, cleaned up and blended with AI. I was proud. Maybe even happy.
So, I kept going. I started clearing the drafts, making a silent promise to myself to finish them all, sooner or later, it didn't matter. No ads. No self-promotion. I even ventured onto well-known self-publishing platforms, despite my self-proclaimed "shitty writing." Three attempts failed, met with bad reviews. I deleted them, revised, incorporating the reviewers' advice, say my thanks, and then re-published. I did not give up.
One book blossomed into three. Then five. Then seven. I continued to write, to bake, to sketch. I drummed when the need to feel alive again became overwhelming.
But tonight, as I sit alone in front of my screen, blinking at a half-finished sentence, I feel it creeping in again. That quiet voice. That cold whisper. And for the first time in a while, I'm afraid… yet again.
I think I'm losing hope…
The feeling was right.
I failed at life.
Again.
**
"You're using AI Cover. Well hey, who am I to say you're not using AI Chats?"
"She uploaded many books in the short span of time, I think she's using AI Chats."
"It's not talent. It's AI."
"Easy cover. Easy content."
"Don't support authors who support AI!"
**
All my hard work…
All my trials at life…
The insidious whisper, once a distant echo, now felt like a cold breath on my neck, a shadow stretching across the carefully constructed landscape of my renewed purpose. It told me I was a fraud, that the brief flicker of joy was nothing but a cruel illusion, destined to extinguish. It pointed to the stack of rejection from readers, to their hate DMs at Reddit because of my cover. The fleeting glimpses of success that seemed to pass me by like elusive butterflies…
My books, once vibrant expressions of a rediscovered self, now felt like naive scribbles.
The positive reviews, few and far between, were swallowed whole by the weight of my own self-doubt.
The negative reviews weren't about the plot or the bad writing itself, but pointed at me being a fraud.
Shit happens, I'd told myself. A mantra to ward off despair. But what if the "shit" was happening to me, repeatedly, relentlessly, a cosmic joke at my expense?
The initial surge of creative energy, the breathless excitement of finishing a story, had begun to wane, replaced by a heavy sense of obligation. Each word felt like pulling teeth, each scene a monumental effort. The joy I'd rediscovered in baking now tasted like ash. My drumsticks lay abandoned beside the kit, the thought of striking a beat feeling utterly pointless. Even my husband's unwavering support, once a lifeline, now felt like a pressure, a silent expectation I feared I could no longer meet. How could I continue to disappoint him, to drag him down into the murky depths of my despair?
The memory of the miscarriage, the memory of the mastectomy surgery, the memory of me fighting cancer…
…the raw, tearing pain of it, had receded somewhat in the initial rush of creative output, but now it returned with a vengeance.
It wasn't just a loss; it was a gaping wound, a void that nothing, not even the act of creation, seemed capable of truly filling.
Every achievement felt tainted, every moment of fleeting happiness undermined by the gnawing question…
Was this enough?
Was any of this enough to compensate for the fundamental failure of my body, of my very being?
The voice whispered that it wasn't. It would never be.
I closed my laptop, the screen going dark, plunging my room into an even deeper shadow. The blankness mirrored the emptiness I felt inside. All the progress, all the tentative steps forward, seemed to crumble into dust. The self-promise to finish all my drafts now felt like a ludicrous delusion.
What was the point? To churn out more mediocre stories, to face more bad reviews, to confirm, yet again, my inherent lack of talent, my ultimate failure? To push people to mock and insult me of using AI Chats?
The fear was cold, sharp, and familiar, like an old adversary returned to claim its due.
It wasn't just the fear of failing at writing, or at baking, or at drumming.
It was the fear of failing at life.
The fear that the dark voice, the one I had tried so desperately to silence, was speaking the truth.
That I was, indeed, meant to just let go.
To stop fighting.
To succumb.
The silence of the room pressed in on me, heavy and suffocating. The city outside, once a soft hum, now felt distant, indifferent to my internal turmoil. I was adrift, untethered, watching as the fragments of my hard-won hope drifted further and further away.
My chest hurt again, a dull, aching throb that had become a constant companion. It wasn't just physical. It was the pain of a spirit slowly, irrevocably, breaking. I had tried so hard. I had fought with every fucking fiber of my fucking being. And yet, here I was, back in the familiar landscape of despair, staring at the precipice of giving up. The words formed in my mind, stark and unyielding, a pronouncement of defeat:
Ifailed at life. Again.
Was this it, then? The end of the road? Or was there still a whisper, however faint, of a battle left to be fought?
Wait.
Is that my husband… Crying? Shouting?
He never shouted.
Why does it feel so suffocating right now?
I-I'm…
Oh.
I see.
I'm dying.
Ha!
Haha!
That's it?
That was all there is to life for me?
Well…
What a fucking ride…!
[System Initializing…]
[...]
[Loading…]
[DATA COMPLETE]
[NEW REALM CHOSEN]