I Write the Truth - Power or Curse?

My therapist says I need to journal and spill my thoughts onto paper. I chose an app instead. This app was weird. I felt like it was stalking me online. Every place I went online, be it a dating app, YouTube, Instagram, or simply googling something random, I found the ad of this app popping up everywhere. It was a nuisance, honestly. But it had the impact that the marketing people created it for, in the first place. It had a cute butterfly, but it was also slightly weird. The left side of the butterfly was cute and purple, while the right side was a scary shadow of the left side. It was intriguing in a way, and the caption was captivating too. It read: your brighter and darker sides together create experiences, and your experiences find a home in The Butterfly Journal. I loved the UI; the look and feel were so appealing that I immediately started writing. But I am also paranoid about these new apps and stuff. I am a person who not only doubts the world but lives in self-doubt, too. Just to give you an idea, I lock my house 5 times, as I think that's the perfect number of times one needs to lock to remember and be sure that we locked in the first place.

Well, coming back to the app and my tendency to check multiple times, I thought of writing it in third-person narrative. My free writing is usually more of a hesitant form of writing, as I am always worried it might be posted somewhere or my privacy would be breached, and I don't like to associate with my embarrassing experiences. It's ok as long as they are embarrassing in my brain, but I don't want it to cause me public humiliation. So that was the intention to write it in a third-person narrative. However, I started feeling like I was narrating someone else’s story, and so I enjoyed fabricating it a little at a time until the story that kept unfolding was surreal. It had a mystic element to it. My character was also a writer because I remember it was supposed to be my story. This app, however, brought all my paranoia to life. This app was only designed for me. It was soaking in the words.

What I enjoyed most was actually the scary part in reality, which I wasn't aware of. The letters, when typed, were like soaked ink, dissolving themselves. They had a symbol of a lemon next to it, indicating that when clicked, the letters would reappear, making my writing readable. I loved this feature in the app. It was so cool. I get bothered by people glancing at my screen or hovering around me when I am writing. I always have this paranoia that someone is standing behind, reading my sacred text. Well, not so sacred of course, but secret, a big yes! Anyways, no sooner did I dive into fictionalizing what happened during my last breakup, making the character the hero of the story, doing heroic things and saving this girlfriend of mine, after which we smooched and it was the best, long-lasting kiss ever. Tongues lapping over each other, hearts pounding, and the embrace made the hearts come together. The feeling was warm, and the touch of the lips, electrifying. While writing this piece of passion, passionately, I heard my name being called, and I got up to grab my coffee. I remembered to use the lemon symbol so that my writing isn't visible.

Upon my arrival back to my table, it's now my workstation, actually. I was looking forward to continuing with my journal entry for today, ending with a heroic smile and a feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of having everything under control. Just then, the lemon button stopped working. No matter how many times I clicked, my words never reappeared. The journal app sent me a notification that all I have written is absorbed into a machine. I saw a machine whirring, and the sound almost exploded my earbuds. I was lucky I had the headphones on. Otherwise, it would be embarrassing. I didn't understand a thing that was happening. I thought maybe I could do with a little break. I shut down my computer and with it my app. I was looking outside the window when I saw across the street a couple who seemed to have engaged in a never-ending fight that was turning hot. In no time, the guy had the girl in his arms, and they were kissing passionately.

Although I wasn't a part of that scene, and definitely couldn't hear them through the glass, and they were at quite a distance from me, it felt like they had popped from my page. Of course, I didn't think of anything more than that. But it was strange that they looked exactly like the characters I had created in my head. Even though it started with it being my story in third-person, just as the words found a place on the page, the description of the man turned out to be not my partially bald self but someone who has good, thick hair. Ever wondered when a person lacks something and portrays that quality in a character, they give that quality in extreme form? This man I was seeing too had thick hair and looked like just gotten out of the ramp. Sigh! His hair! The lip-lock between him and that beautiful, sensuous woman gave me a sad feeling of missing out on life, in real. Well, back to the app. I continued to write about them. The girl invites the hero to her cabin. I am writing this because Margaret never took me to her room, which she described as a manor. A lot of secret hiding spots where she hid the gifts I gave her from her roomies. I had this picture of her room in my mind. You might find it strange, but when she decided to break up with me in that moment, I felt like I was losing my chance of seeing the one thing I wanted to see so bad - her cabin. Waking up to a window facing the woods behind, with her in my arms, was a dream unlived. Anyways, so the girl in my journal takes the hero to her cabin. He sees it the way I saw it. I put everything I thought, felt, and expressed onto him.

There was a dark corner in the room. A secret passage, or what? The guy is curious to know. He wants to go and check it out, but his girl pushes him onto the bed to show him love. But the guy wanted to explore the dark corner. I guess this idea stems from my inquisitiveness as a child to want to explore the dark passage in my mother’s bedroom. She never permitted me to go there. She told me there were hidden monsters there. I once went there when my mom wasn't home. I was 4 at that time. I heard something in the dark and dropped the cookie that I was holding and fled from there. To this day, darkness holds this great mystery for me. I fear it, and yet I want to explore what lurks in it. I am sure there is something unknown in there, waiting to engulf us. So this character, this man, awaits his girl’s pleasurable moments to come to an end. While she lay fatigued on the corner of the bed, slightly snoring with the heavy cardio on the bed with her guy, he managed to tiptoe into the dark corner. He thought he heard something.

Something shuffled. The sound was more like clothes being thrown. It was that light and sound. He was scared, but the man still took steps forward. The dark corner that seemed like the corner part of the apartment, right behind the bedroom door, turned out to be not marking a distinct end to the room but having more space than that. At first, it felt like the start of a tunnel. The air was chilly in that corner. The man did ask about this corner, but she was not in the mood to answer her questions. The man felt something breathing over his neck. He turned around, in the same second, regretting his choice of exploring this place and not switching on the lights instead. He turned around but kept his eyes shut. When he did open for a microsecond, he saw something furry. His hand, involuntarily, touched the fur and felt it like a fur coat, and let it be. But then a sudden shriek, a sudden scream. His hand was bitten off. Not like a scratch, but his hand was severed. Blood sprayed everywhere, and the flesh was all open. The man screamed in pain.

His girlfriend was in bed, still lying down with a smile on her face. When she opened her eyes, it wasn't the same. It was blood red. She sniffed and smiled. The aroma of metallic blood made her thirsty, and one second she was here on bed, the very next she leaped onto the blood and started licking it from the floor while the furry monster patted her head for doing the job well. I don't know why my thoughts are so scary. No wonder my therapist asked me to journal them. But here I am, instead of doing it right, I am making more stories. Guess this is God’s way of making me the next Stephen King. Little did I know at this time that whatever I am writing, I am creating characters, and they are coming in real life. Every time I said, whenever I thought of the betrayal and the way I was dumped on the roadside, that my girlfriend was a beautiful vampire. And lo! This woman did turn out to be the vampire in reality.

That man, I am lucky, I wrote his character in third-person, else I would be suffering that fate. That monster was my imagination from age 4. All of what I wrote in that unholy butterfly app in the name of a journal entry took shape in reality. When I leave this barista, I am going to read the news of this brutal, mysterious death in the papers, and when I know the truth that it's my writing that caused this, I am going to repent. Not that I wrote characters and they came in real life, and one of them even killed the other, but the fact that my first entry on the app was actually about me (in first person). Want to know what it was? Before I can say that, my hands pick up the gun I had for my safety, I bought because of my craziness with thriller murder mysteries that resulted in my paranoia, which in turn resulted in my visit to the therapist’s clinic. I shot myself in my leg because my very first “innocent” entry into the butterfly app was “I will shoot myself in the foot if my decision of trusting this app goes awry,” and awry it did go.