Warning: This work has been rated 18+ for language, violence, and mature content.
Fade Into You
Brooklyn Davis
One
I don’t wanna be me anymore
~~~~~~~
There was once a time where I believed wholeheartedly that there was something beyond life on Earth. I believed in a god. A savior of humanity. That belief faded and eventually disappeared when I realized how awful life is. How could God love me and treasure me as much as the Bible’s teachings say, yet I feel such misery? I came into this world a happy child, and as I have grown, my life has been filled with sorrow. How could God do this to me? I was just a kid.
~~~~~~~
My name is Jane. I’m here to tell the story of my life.
Things started to change when I was five. My parents divorced. My mom found out that my father had cheated, lied about money and had a drug and alcohol problem. I didn’t see my dad more than 12 days a year, once for every month, for 4 years. During my mom’s time, I lived with her and her boyfriend. During my father’s time, I stayed with his parents. That was okay, at least until my mom started to change. She would behave irrationally at times, spending too much money on unnecessary things, being overly filled with excitement and irritability. After a couple years of this, she received her diagnosis. Type two bipolar disorder. It made sense of the chaos. I didn’t know that I’d be receiving the same diagnosis at the age of 14.
Throughout my life it seemed like things just kept getting worse and worse. I began to self-harm when I was 10. It started with picking at my skin when I would get stressed, then progressed to scratching with pencils, staples, thumbtacks, anything I could find. Then I started cutting. First with box cutters, then blades taken out of pencil sharpeners, then the blades from razors. I started drinking and smoking weed, as well as vaping.
When I was 13, I started high school. I noticed this girl in particular, she interested me because I noticed bandaids on her arms that covered cuts in straight perfect lines. I wanted to ask her if she was okay, if she wanted to talk about it. I wanted to roll up my sleeves and tell her it’s okay, that I understand. Instead, I kept quiet. I was never one for seeking out others. One day, two months into the school year, we got put in a group together for our science class. I didn’t know how to make conversation, so I simply pointed out that it was stupid that we weren’t allowed to carry scissors in our bags but could use them for projects in school. We began talking, she showed me a page in this book that made me realize she knew I was like her. It was a page talking about how it feels to self-harm. I just nodded, and said “That’s a good way of putting it.” Two days later I began to realize there was something special about her. I had a connection with her somehow. There was a football game after school, and I wasn’t going to go, but then she said she’d be there, so I decided to go. I started asking around for her Snapchat, eventually somebody gave it to me and I sent her a message. I told her I’d be at the game and that I would meet her there if it was alright with her. She agreed. I felt a sense of relief and joy that I hadn’t felt in such a long time.
The day after this game, she wanted to call me. I agreed and once we got home from school, I called her. We talked for five hours, just about everything, from our favorite movie to our traumas. I was so interested in her stories, fascinated by the way she talked, the sound of her voice and her laughter, the pain in her voice when she spoke of her worst memories as well as the passion in her voice when she told me about her favorite things. At this time, I had never seen her face. It was during the pandemic so we wore masks all the time, but it only took a short while before I realized I was falling for her. I didn’t need to see her face to know how I felt about her. After this phone call, I stayed up late thinking about our conversations and about her life stories. I felt this fluttery feeling in my chest thinking about her voice and her way of speaking. Right then, I knew then that I loved her. From that day on, my life truly began.
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141,687 Literary Works • 675,575 Reviews
Happy Holidays! My name is Ley (or Lektra) and I'm here to review this sparkling work with my new holiday-themed review template: just in time for winter! I hope that this review helps you in more ways than one. Let's sit by the fire, get our marshmallows ready, and discuss this piece you have here. Huzzah!
❄️ Winter Whispers ❄️
It seems like we have a realistic narrative here, if I'm correct! We're first introduced to the narrator, who seems to be going through a pretty tough time. I was intrigued by the blood type remark in the beginning because I'm not sure if it has some deeper meaning or not. Funny enough, I'm also O negative blood. So this piece captured my attention right away!
🎅 Warm Sugar Cookie 🎅
I love the emotion you managed to capture in this piece. You started out by giving us what I think is a journal entry of some kind (I could be completely wrong, so feel free to correct me on that!), and then you lead us into the actual story where we learn more about who the narrator is. Jane seems like such a sweet person, but she's shadowed by what's happening in her family and personal life. This is super relatable, and you did a wonderful job of exaggerating how much of Jane's life is effected by the things happening around her.
It also seems like you put a lot of thought into character design for Jane, as her story was descriptive and informative. I felt like I got to know Jane on a personal level in just a few paragraphs, so if that was your intention, amazing job!
🌟 Chilling Critique 🌟
I feel like TheTaostedWriter made some great suggestions, but I just wanted to highlight this portion here:
I don't want to insert the whole entire paragraph, but the area where this snippet lies can be separated a bit. Dialogue reads best when each person's line is spaced out, and it's quite easier on the eyes. Easy formatting fix, though!
🎆 The Grand Finale 🎆
Thank you for sharing! I hope to see you more around YWS, and I hope to read more of your awesome stories <3 have a wonderful day/night!
Wishing you a season filled with joy, laughter, and love! <3
Hi there!
So, all in all, this is a good story. My best advice off a whim is to shorten the paragraphs. It's a common thing and it's perfectly fine, there is absolutely nothing wrong with big paragraphs, but they are hard to read. They're hard on the eyes, and most readers skip over the bigger paragraphs, regardless of how important.
The best tip I can give to fix this is to look at the scene. New scene, new paragraph. New description, new paragraph. Dialogue (Like we all know and learned hopefully), new paragraph. I, too, make the mistake, which is why I always have a close friend read over my work and be my "editor" when I can, but I'm aware not all of us have that, which is another reason why this place is amazing.
Anyways, I'm getting off topic. Something I loved about reading this was the wlw presented. It's not often we get a story like that, and it's so amazing to see one.
Now, me personally, you absolutely don't have to do this, but when it comes to going into the past, or talking about a backstory, I like to keep detail spaced out. Drop a memory here and there instead of piling it all into one section, but if this is intentionally written like a diary entry, then it's perfect the way it is.
In general, this is a good work of art, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading through this. Good job!
Keep it up!
~Taost