The Story of My Life

There is a place. A palace, a city, a kingdom, an entire world that I am slowly exploring. This world is entirely in my head. I daydream about it being a real place with a real history. My own special gift from God that no one else can explore unless I give them permission. All of the stories I've written (the good ones anyway) have happened in this particular world.

The main story is “After the Heavens Rained.” It is an adventure that has grown along with me for as long as I can remember. I've called it and it's characters by many names, and characters have come and gone. Almost everything has changed in the story, just like I have changed since I began writing it. This story has been my retreat, my plaything, my hope, at times my chore, but always important. Always terribly important. And I'm writing it again.

Again because I've finished it before. I even have the entire document saved and I could simply go back and edit that version rather than starting over again. Yet I feel so strongly about making this story the absolute highest that I can make it that I began it all over. Again.

I think it has a lot to do with how I grow. When the story started I was very young, around 3 or 4 years old. I had a vague imagery of a girl, me, and two male companions her age being captured by pirates and tied up on a beach. I don't know if everyone is like this but I've always seen myself from the inside looking out as an adult, since I can't think of any other way to describe it. I think it must be that souls do not age but always see themselves the same way.

When I was older, 7 or 8, I wanted nothing but adventure, but I was in school with my friends. School was boring and I hated gym class. To make myself feel better I began to imagine that gym class was training for fighting, and that somewhere in our near future my friends and I would have to fight a battle. It didn't even matter why we would fight this battle, I simply knew that we had to. My story then became a group of friends in a school learning to fight against pirates. I began to imagine myself wearing a cape. My grandmother made me one of soft gray-blue cloth with a ribbon to tie around my collar. I would wear black velvet pants and a white button up shirt with my cape and hold a plastic sword or a stick in my hand and strut around the yard, daring the pirates to show themselves. In my mind I had complete control of the world, any enemy who faced me would fall before my mighty blade.

I did not count on one enemy. My parents took my brother and I to a Wendy's one night for dinner. I was feeling grown up and confident so I ordered a salad because I thought that it was a very grown up thing to order. We went and sat outside at a picnic table and I asked dad what we had come there to talk about.

“We're moving to Ohio.”

I broke instantly. I began sobbing at the table. I would have to leave my friends, the only ones to help me fight against the pirates. I would have to switch schools in the middle of the year, I would be the new kid.

We moved and suddenly my story was my escape. I would sit in class, watching out the window. I would wish that I could stalk over to the window, throw it open, run out onto the roof and fly myself away to freedom. I had a thousand escape plans and even began to try to memorize the points of the compass so I could fly myself back to New England. I began to write my story down and it began with the main character being dragged into an empty white room that was meant to hold her and kill her, but she escaped and flew back to her friends and her mission.

After a few years I broke again. Escape was not possible. I was simply trapped in school in a strange state that I did not feel was home. My grades plummeted. The children in school with me were cruel and the teachers, who claimed that they would help me, refused to acknowledge my need. I began to have thoughts of suicide, wondering how much it would hurt if I took a knife to my wrist. I continued to write and I drew the first map of my world. The story began to change ever so slightly. Suddenly it was the main character telling her tale of adventure to her small children. Suddenly there were castles. The main characters were a princess of a race of people who could fly and could now turn themselves into fire, her younger brother, a prince from another land who was fighting his own battle, and a massive army of children who they were teaching to fight against the great enemy I still referred to as the pirates.

Then God allowed me to meet Aisling. I was lost in fantasy then. I was so used to lying to myself and making stories in my head to get away from reality that I didn't know what else to do. I wanted to do something great with my life, I knew that I was here for a purpose, but I had no direction. Aisling had it. She was confident in reality. Fantasy was her puppet, not her life. I wanted to be everything she was, and I thank God for that. Aisling began to teach me and I slowly learned that there was an enemy to fight and there was a reason to fight him along with a way to fight him. People were in desperate danger, and I had the power to save them. What I didn't realize was that Aisling had just saved me. I set my book aside and began to dream of being a missionary to far off countries, battling the dark forces of this world.

That dream did not last long. After a few months I think I grew bored with it. I picked up my story again and began to see it as a way to fight for God, I could bring people closer to God if my characters were following him. The enemy in the book became a race of evil people who had rebelled against God, and the main character was a star in the sky who could come down to fight them, and there were humans caught in between. 

I began to notice the boys around me. The main character and the human prince began to fall in love. The story faded quickly from an adventure to a romance. I lost that adventure lust I had had. Every story that came to my mind was a romance. The human prince in my book was “secretly” modeled after the Captain. The story adopted it's new name, “After the Heavens Rained.”

I sat down one week on spring break and wrote page after page after page. I was nearing the end of the story, something I had never seen before. I came closer to finishing High School, the end of school was in sight. Then my book was finished. I thought I would simply edit it and publish it. I graduated and spent the summer writing while preparing for college. I took it to college and worked on it, trying to force myself to edit the entire thing before the end of the year. I began to worry that the Captain would never love me. I asked Aisling what love was because I wanted to be sure of what I was feeling for him. I felt discouraged with my book again but pushed myself to work on it. It was the only thing I had that could lead to the future since I hated college as much as I had hated school and had no assurance that the Captain would come for me. I cried myself to sleep at night trying to decide how I would live if he married another girl.

I began to reach the end of my book again. The part where the enemy is defeated and the weddings begin. The Captain took me out in the woods and handed me a bouquet of white flowers. I wrote it into my book. I finished the story again and sent it out for reviews, feeling higher than ever.

Some time has passed and I'm still a bit close to the events to know exactly how it played out. I was not satisfied with the story. My writing had improved too much and I had left the story behind. It needed to be rethought and redone. Maybe this will be the last version. Maybe I'll read it and send it off to publish it instead of begin it again. Maybe I'm done growing. Maybe I still have more to explore in both worlds. Whatever the rest of my story holds I want to add;

To God be all the glory, for all that He has done for me and given to me.