Page 61 of Five Minute Man
Then the colored leaves were gone, too, leaving the trees bare and stark-looking. The brightly colored chrysanthemums and kale flourishing at the front of the house dried out; the last of the roses died and fell away; the variegated green and white blades of the abundant hostas withered away, leaving everything in varying shades of grays and browns.
It was as though the season had finally attuned itself to Holly’s existence.
Too cold to sit outside, she sat at the kitchen table, Max splayed across the tops of her feet, lest she tried to sneak away while he napped. She sipped her coffee and stared blankly at the laptop screen. The cursor blinked patiently, incessantly, waiting for her fingers to tap on the keys and weave a new story, but it just wasn’t happening.
At one time, writing had been her passion, the thing she loved to do above all else. In Holly’s eyes, being an author was the best job in the world. With a few strokes of the keys, she could create entire worlds where true love existed, good triumphed over evil, and the endings were always happy ones. It had been her privilege to escape into those realms each and every day, some part of her believing that somewhere, someday, someone might read her stories and find a sliver of the same joy in reading them that she had in writing them.
But now ... it seemed pointless. To craft a good tale, an author had to be able to envision things like soul mates and happy endings, even if she no longer believed they were possible. These days, all her thoughts were dark. Her inner vixen, the one she used to call upon for sass and spice, remained silent and sullen. Even Vinny was forgotten, laying dormant in the bottom of her underwear drawer.
Despite all that, she missed writing. She longed to lose herself in a story, to let her fingers fly as her brain tried to translate those ideas and thoughts and feelings into written, readable prose. Where she could leave her own reality behind and create something better.
She needed that escape, but the ideas just wouldn’t come.
Holly sighed and let her hands hover over the keyboard, twitching. Maybe, instead of writing about someone else’s world, she should write about her own. If she couldn’t create a new story, maybe she could find some measure of comfort in transcribing one she already knew.
And so, it began. Once Holly started, she couldn’t stop. Everything she had held deep inside, everything she hadn’t been able to talk about, came out on the pages. All the hurt, the ache, the tremendous feeling of loss and betrayal.
As she wrote, she began to realize it hadn’t beenallbad. There had been a lot of good crammed into those couple weeks. Sunset picnics on the lake. Pizza and movies. Incredible, mind-blowing sex.
The wonder of finding the one person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with.
Writing her own story became an obsession. It was the first thing she did when she got up in the morning and the last thing she did before closing her eyes in exhaustion at night. She took breaks only when her body demanded it. The more she wrote, the more she remembered. All the little details that had gotten lost in the face of so much overwhelming drama. The feelings were so raw, so real, they translated onto the pages with minimal conscious effort.
It was beautiful and tragic and heartbreaking. It wascathartic.
Originally, Holly had begun writing it as a means of private, personal therapy. It was intended as an exercise to release some of the pain and begin healing. But by the time she finished, she knew it was quite possibly the best thing she had ever written.
