They were never there...

I was meant to be famous, trust me. Stars were meant to be fighting to carry my name. Books were meant to be written - holding the story of Liam the - amazingly magnificent wonder of nature - great. Until that piece of rock shattered every single one of my dreams, till they were only dust in the wind, howling the sad ballad of my demise. Until that strangely shaped waste of earth managed to break years of... Well, let's just say no object should carry such immense power. No one thought much of it; a single blow on the head, happens to the best of us. But only the very best manage to lose the very thing that makes life worth living. People say I am being dramatic, I say you never know how much you have, until you don't.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. To fully understand the extent of my misery, we must start at the beginning.

In August 1990, a magnificent person named Liam was born, who happens to be me. A lot would say it's a figment of imagination, but to this day, I remember the first time I saw a word. That amazingly simple combination of shapes and lines that can be turned into anything, mean anything. And since then, it had been my whole life, looking for those combinations, the ones that sounded, looked, and felt the best. And I would still be doing so. If it wasn't for that day at the beach.

The day at the beach, my Brother and I, enjoying the last rays of the lazy Indian summer sun, went by as any other day at the beach would. It was on the way back to the car that it occurred to me that my hat must have been left behind. And that's when the luck that has followed me my whole life decided to say goodbye. My otherwise brilliant mind had, for some strange reason, decided to take a shortcut; a few rocks were all in the way between me and my hat, and what obstacle is that?

Thinking about it now, I still don't quite understand how it went down. If it was a misstep, a slide, or just an intended step that was supposed to go differently. But in a fragment of a second, I found myself lying on the ground. I wanted to get up. I wanted to scream for help, to tell anyone that I was there between the rocks, unable to put two words together. In situations like that, time and pain become insignificant. I lay there, looking at the clouds above me passing by, praying that there will be another person who gets the same strange idea as me, for them to find me, save me, bring me back from this state between life and death. Now I sometimes wish I had never been found at all. But as I said, luck has left me, and I opened my eyes in the hospital, not that I remember closing them.

"You are going to be alright," the doctors said. Quite hard to believe when your life depends on a body that seems to no longer listen. Although my judgment was heavily influenced by the feeling of hopelessness, and the thoughts of my utter downfall, I had watched myselg get better from a distance, as if my body wasn't my own anymore. It took me exactly 8 weeks, 3 days, 15 hours, and 34 minutes before I was ready to face the life outside the hospital walls, ready to conquer it yet again.

I felt like I was at the top of the world, basically invincible, after greeting death and coming back.

Life was great for another 5 weeks, when it all came crashing down. Grocery shopping plan gone wrong. A simple list, with the same item listed at least 3 times. My first thought was: impossible, for I could swear I only wrote in once. But that soon became unlikely as I figured that my list of 21 items were actually 4 of them, switching order every time. And I got pushed back to the scary place I had so gladly left.

My Brother came to visit, found me in a state of pure fear, an image scary enough for him to move in. He told me I was fine. Fine. Completely fine. Never better fine. As if repeating it was going to make it come true. I didn't understand the source of his positivity, what is fine about placing a candle next to another one, wondering who has bought it before you? Only to realize it was you a few days ago.

This all I could endure, made me feel quite unintelligent, but I still had my words to come save me when my brain decided to go on a strike. Sure, my sentences tended to get repetitive, but I do believe it added a poetic flair to my writing. Life went on. And for a small moment, I let myself believe I was fine.

Until the words started to blend into the page, disappearing before they were read, followed by the scary realization that they were never there at all.

I was holding the pen, centimeters away from the paper, unable to do the thing that used to come so naturally to me. Realizing, I had lost the one thing that has defined me my whole life. My hand stayed still over the page, not moving, refusing to do so.

The worst part? No one understood me, people would pity my memory, my dependence on others, commenting on everything except for what actually mattered. Their idea of what I lost was shallow, insignificant really. No one saw me slowly drowning in my own thoughts, them overflowing my mind, as I was unable to channel them to the page. I became unable to breathe, suffocating, losing myself, in the prison of my own mind.

And people had the audacity to call me dramatic.