Delete

Thoughts nobody asked for. My cryptic diary.

I spent the year with my soul curled up in a ball, dreaming about deleting the monster I’ve created. A thousand mugs of Earl Grey I tried to drown myself in.

How to delete the monsters you create, if you feed on their joy and their pain? You wake up thinking – never again! No more games. Delete. Tame the monster within you. The one who vomits words through every pore of your fingertips. The one who takes you into a room of a thousand cruel mirrors, each one telling a different story. Each one contains a shard of you.

I want to smash the mirrors in my head. Every reflective surface bleeds darkness, none of them are kind to me.

I don’t deserve kindness. All I deserve are mirrors, surfaces showing what I’ve become. A narcissists worst enemy is the mirror. The kind that shows the soul.

I want to delete the monster; the beautiful blankness devouring line by line like the first snow deleting the grey asphalt roads.

Winter comes to erase the tired, man-made world. It deletes the world you once knew. Winter is a blank page you dread. Its silence makes the noise inside you all the louder. Softness of the snow-covered world needs no words. It starves the monster to death, because there’s nothing it hates more than silence and stillness. The monster feeds on growth, progress, compliments, but most of all – on attention.

I want to love ignorance again. I loved being invisible. The monster glows like a neon sign. Look at me, it screams. It shines. The monster is impressive but it’s never satisfied. It’s never impressed. It despises all. Nothing is ever good enough.

My soul embraces the warm tea mug. Earl Grey is a hugger. He knows my secrets, but he never judges me. A kind gentleman. I miss the times I’ve never lived in, the ones where true gentlemen were not a rare breed. I’d be the eternal damsel, and they would never get tired of rescuing me, no matter what. Alas, Earl Grey is the one to rescue me tonight. The monster demands another sacrifice, a handful of words to throw into the winds of the world.

Afterward I’ll curl up in a ball, dreaming how maybe tomorrow I’ll delete the monster called Kathrine Elaine.

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Well, now. That’s out of the way, let’s move on. Hopefully I’ll share a new short story next week (if I don’t delete my Substack, ha ha wink wink). No, it’s just… I’ve come so far. I would miss you guys. I would miss sharing stories. But I’m not going to deny – social media is a lonesome place, and sometimes even a hostile one. I did just fine without it. Bah, I’m not here to whine again.

I have a strange event coming next week, on Nov 28^th. Another writing competition, BUT this is a weird one. Because I won’t know if I’m a finalist until the event itself. The finalists will be announced during the event, and they are supposed to read their stories out loud. Again. So, I might be standing there, in an 18^th century manor, all dressed up and well-rehearsed (NOT!) for nothing, plus surrounded by complete strangers, forced to have awkward small talk with them. Help. The story I submitted to the competition is called “The sea took me”. It’s not a story, it’s a fuzzy ball of salty misery. If I make it to this event, I will post a full report of my grand failure. Lady Kathrine’s grand folly. Sounds good?

Love,

Kathrine 🩶