Victim and the Survivor

A shiver ran through her spine, as she saw him creeping on her from behind. She could sense him from his shadows. She did not need to see him, to know who it was.  After all, he was too familiar for her not to recognize. She knew it was him from how helpless she suddenly felt, how the smell of the tiny motel room suddenly turned overwhelmingly musty. She felt nauseated, hopeless.

He shouldn’t be knowing where she was. He wasn’t welcome here. The very reason she avoided all the familiarity of her place in the city and moved to this musty motel in a sparsely populated sleepy town miles away, was to check if change in scenes could help her get over him. She had a deadline in a week and she needed to deliver, if she wanted to be even a tenth of where she saw herself in five years. This was her golden opportunity, and she did not want to leave anything to chance. She had a calculated plan in place, on what to accomplish by which time frame and was satisfied when all was going well,  but she did not factor his intrusion in this. She thought she made it clear to him that they were done with each other, and never wanted to meet ever again.

The first time they chanced upon each other, she was unsure of who she was. She did not know how to identify herself as. She was confused, and was doubting her abilities when he came and annihilated her confidence. She was being called a fluke, a one shot celebrity who chanced upon a great idea once. She was labeled as a failure; yet another  woman who burnt out on luck. Meeting him then brought out the worst in her, as she started believing in what people said. It took her a lot of grit, determination and self belief to realize she is not what the society declared her to be, and she needed to move away from him to make it big. Again.

She was the happiest she could ever be when he wasn’t around, yet she was always drawn to him. Seduced and tempted by him, addicted to the numbness he brought to their dynamic. She spent hours and even days in bed with him, occupied fully by the idea of him, oblivious to the outside world, completely failing her responsibilities as a daughter, friend, sister and everything else that she was. It was easier to believe in the filthy world he constructed for her out of nothingness and vacuum.

But once she broke out of his wizardry, she could see what her purpose in this life was. And she found people who loved her, rooting for her, waiting for her to deliver. People like her editor who was the single ray of sunshine in her life, whom she met at a work party. The Editor who gave an inexperienced amateur writer like her the first break, was the sole reason she could dare enough to quit her corporate job and decide to try her luck as a full time novelist. Now that she wasn’t casual about her future anymore, there was no place in her life for him. She decided in that split second, in that shady motel room, in the outskirts of that sleepy town, that she would do the unthinkable. She would end his existence. He did not deserve to live, if he had as much power to mess with her future.

Taking the ink pen in her left hand and a paper knife in the right, she suddenly turned around. He was sneaking up on her, to surprise her but was in turn shocked to see her determined eyes. She stabbed him repeatedly with the paper knife, screeching and bawling all the pent up frustration in her, not paying heed to the howling cries he made while he collapsed down on the marbled floor. When she was completely satiated and sure that he had no shred of life in him, she got her notepad and sat down on his crumpled form, starting the next chapter of her novel, which was to be delivered next week. She would later decide on the trivialities like how to dispose him.

“Tschüss, mein Schatz”, she murmured to the now defeated Mr. Writer’s Block.