(The reason I don't update on weekends = dependence on school computer lab. The world is a cold, cruel place. Pray for me.)

Saturday night. I've been suffering through a lonely day at the dorm, some degree of lethargy evident. Grandma calls, we chat about random current stuff, say goodbye. My meandering train of thought wanders into a nasty old tunnel. I start remembering a painful event about five years ago.

Not the terrorist attacks in the U.S.A. They did come as a shock, but the level of personal pain I felt was minimal, nothing compared to the deep sorrow, rage, confusion, and loss I felt one week into the new year of 2002, when two of my cousins committed suicide.

They say truth trumps fiction as a subject for writing. This is a truism in the book market, where sales of non-fiction far surpass the market share of fiction. But then, from the point of view of an unpublished writer such as myself, the subject of writing is determined solely by what they have to say, regardless of the reception it receives. I decided to write the story of my cousins' suicide, because there is so much I want to say about it and because I have so many questions related to it and because I feel so very strongly about it. I've finally found a real reason to write.

(Rereading the first non-parenthetical paragraph here, I notice I inadvertently used a metaphor directly relevant to my subject. The method they used was suicide by freight train.)

So I sit down at the table and get a page written, single-spaced, in my notebook. I notice one of the items on the table is a pack of cards. At that moment, I become conscious of a terrible association playing cards have had in my subconscious ever since: my cousins' suicide note was left on a coffee table in the midst of a deck of cards. It read: "In this game, life itself was at stake."

This is as deep as I'm going to go on the subject in my blog. The details are too terrible to share publicly.

I don't know if I'll ever write Bionicle fan fiction again.

-BC