For the first time in my life, I was experiencing a feeling that one of my main characters was experiencing: the exasperated worry of a family member, the approaching, impending end.

I have been somewhat familiar with these feelings before. Being a writer, your mind tries on many emotions like anyone tries on clothes. I recognized the signs, and I knew how they affected a person. But this was the first time that I felt them, and how ironic that they bore resemblance to the feelings I’ve written. They bit at their hardest when I went to my cousin’s home for lunch (by force--I was not too keen on interaction) and slowly the character I created, fed with artificial feelings and like a God, to take it all and ‘kill’ his last strand of childhood with the flick of a pen, slowly, melted into me.

It was around the time that I looked about the large house as I usually did when a distraction goaded me for a closer look. My aunt Martha was bathing her one-year-old son in the bathtub, and I peeked in and awkwardly watched as the little boy laughed up at me and splashed about in the tub. His mother was crooning to him, as all mothers seem to do, and I was politely ignored. I was content on standing and not saying much, mesmerized by my cousin’s little bath escapades simply because I was too bored to really care. Then, my aunt broke the silence.

“Has Sammy written to you yet?”

Of course, she spoke in Spanish. We all did, and although I naturally preferred dominant English, I had no choice with her. She knew very little English, so I did the best with my own Spanish, which I’ll have to admit wasn’t the best thing you’ll ever hear. Still, I found it surprising for her to bring up my cousin Sammy. The son of her brother, Sammy, or Santiago if you wish to use his real name, was twenty-one, and one of my closest cousins. He was in the Army, a thing nobody liked in my large family for the system, but mostly because it was the place where you were bound to be first in action, and the first to eventually die.

“No,” I answered, looking at her face, and I saw that her eyes were red. I continued, pretending I didn’t notice although I was looking right into them. “he’s in Italy, so--”

“He’s in Iraq. A card was sent to him, and he had to go.”

I nodded as though understanding what I’ve been told was terribly bad for him, but to be honest, I wasn’t wracked with grief. I wasn’t even shouting into her face that it wasn’t true, or denying we ever had this short conversation. Not even a wet eye betrayed emotion, because at first I didn’t seem to possess any. I was like a mother wolf who experienced a litter of stillborn pups. She would lick and nudge and paw at them, but there was a puzzled look to it all that many people would mistake it for grief at her lost ones. Death was alien. It had no taste, no color, no scent. It had no feel nor could it feel. And a creature who relied on scent more than any other scents, it took her days to realize that the pups were nothing. They had no smell, they had no feel, no response, so it was as though they didn’t exist.

It would take the lupine days, yes, but as for humans with more advanced emotions, the more dominant creature of the world, it took less than that. It only took me hours. And when I nudged and pawed at the idea of my cousin Sammy in Iraq for a few good hours and realized the grip of death, everything changed completely. It was as though the character in my story had switched lives with me. Here came shock, now grief, than denial, then regret, then more grief. It was instinct, but that didn’t make my sudden pain any less. Instead of him being trapped in the snowy mountains like my own character, he would be exposed to the hot, bitter world of war.

Like the friends of my character, his own companions would surely die. And I could see him, forced to eat his own kind, not in a cannibalistic way, but in a way that called for self-preservation. And Sammy was too kind-hearted, too sensitive, to even consider ending anyone’s live even if to save his own. And then came that ugly image that I knew was coming, the thing I could never block out of my mind by force, the image of him dying a dozen times. And I was here, thousands of miles away, growing fat at the idea that I was invincible, and thus cannot die. The way I acted, it was as though he was dead already, his blood spilling into the hungry soil. At night, I could not sleep, tossing and turning and feeling the worry eat away at me, making me hot and nauseous and torn. He is my favorite!, I seem to shout into the chasm of my hurting hart. Damn it, why take him? In a way, I began to see his own doomed situation.

Sammy, twenty-one, never got laid, never achieved in making an RPG with his friends, never got to know anyone better, never showed off his two freshly made tattoos, never…oh, but the list was endless.

Anguish had snared me then. I remembered the last time he appeared in the flesh, before he went off to Iraq. His brown eyes looking down at me as he pretended to hate being hugged by me. All of it was cruel. My close cousin since birth, far away from the comforts of his soft life, not knowing if today was the last day on earth. And he’s still there. Almost a month has passed, and he’s still there. And he’ll be there for the next nine months. And like my character in my book, there was little I could do about it. The Higher Authority that everyone calls God was the writer now. Like I had done so many times before, he had picked up his pen, and was already writing out the end for the many characters in his book. It made me aware of my own experiences, of my own inner hurts. It made me see that the world was nothing more than a breeding ground of many interests for the one writer in the entire universe.

It did change me, but not in the way many people expected it to be. Here, they would assume that I, Cristina Enizey Vega, has turned over a new leaf in writing. That I would write sugary-sweet heroes and buttercream endings, to turn over a new leaf. If they knew me at all, I was one who wouldn’t bother to turn over any leaf, but casually step on it in my quest to acquire more and more knowledge of writing. What does a leaf mean to me, other than another cliché-ridden meaning, or something you’d find all over the place, being blown about in the wind? Leaf? I was the shoe, the God of my own universe. And so it goes. I lay down on the floor, my pen flashing in the air like it always has done, cutting words through the paper like a knife cuts butter. And here, I hesitated. I looked down at the familiar words, at the world I created. I could feel it breathing, and as I peered in to get a closer look, I could even see it.

As always, that little boy peered out of his window, clinging to the hope that his brother would be found alive. Experiencing the agony of waiting myself, I sucked in my breath and saw the anxious, sad look in that boy’s eyes. How he clung at the window, smearing the glass from the oils of his palms. The hand that held the pen quivered. I could even smell the boy, a hot musk of salt and sweat. My teeth ached, my eyes hurt, but my heart--

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, knowing full well that the boy would never hear my words. “but for the good of the story--”. Even as I said it, I could hear the Higher Authority--the One Writer of All--whisper these words into my mind, seeing him pick up his pen, saying to me, “I’m sorry, Cristina, but for the good of the story--”. I saw his target, a young man running across the dirt, wildly trying to duck while looking over his shoulder. Then the pen slashed down, and I could feel something inside me rip and bleed like black ink. But--Sammy--!

I slammed my pen on the paper, feeling water surround my dry, aching eyes, my vision blurring as tears forced themselves to tip over and splatter on the pages. Was this the reality of the writer? This feeling of hopelessness, even when you were the god of your own kingdom? Being, it seemed, a heartless being who played with people, tossing them scraps and see what they did, seeing them amuse you yet you died a little inside in shame? I saw why so many lived in bitter seclusion. I looked at my paper again. So…this was the writer. Usurped, awake, and aware.

And so I said to myself, ‘To hell with it. To hell with my world’. The pen was seized, and I began to write. I decided not to kill anyone tonight. But I knew I would. It would only be a matter of time, and I knew it well. Instead of having fun with my writing, a more serious young woman was born from the ruins. The little boy ended up being the youngest brother to a boy who witnessed a horrible thing when he was that brother’s age. That boy, now teen, would survive the camp of snow, but pay a price. Nothing is free, I know that now, and even as I write this story, I am aware of my cousin, his life a ticking time bomb that would go off soon, even as I am jotting down these words. I was a different human being now. If my cousin dies like that so carelessly, I would not cry the same way my parents would, my aunt would, my brothers, my cousins, his brothers or his parents. I am a person who saw something different, who a piece of herself would crumble, but my writing would live on.

I understood the concept of give, then take away, even if I was not a supporter of any Almighty, I knew its power because I was one. And it didn’t have to be anything as cruel as I was experiencing. You could have a person by your side until natural death parted you, but was that the case nowadays? My only regret was that I wished we had something else to talk about other than how much we’ve played-argued, and that he would stay alive long enough to see my future, and I his. As my father says, ‘Life lives on’, and as a writer, I knew this phrase all too well. It was a writer’s curse. Writers know the feelings, know what will happen--it’s so predicable--because you’ve read so much that everything feels like a cliché that has happened so many times before, and so you try so hard to write something different, to break away from it all. And this is why I write. I write, knowing that my pitiful pen wouldn’t be enough to keep my cousin safe, that a more powerful writer had control of everything, even over me.

Could a writer be so cruel as to leave me hanging with the pain of my cousin everyday, while he lounges in his own throne?

Putting my pen down, I left my story in peace to lay down on my bed for another night of troubled sleep. Somehow, that question didn’t need an answer. I hope that everything would turn out okay, and even though you think that writers really can be cruel, you’ll find that they really aren’t that bad, that they follow through a system as natural as the blood that flows through everyone’s veins. The boy in the story can shout all of his hate towards God, but never forget that God…is me.