Cathy Marie Bown

There is a time between the ending of one chapter and the beginning of the next. How much time passes depends on the story. In some stories, mere seconds. But in others, the time spent “in between” can be months or years, small eternities between the most important details.

But that time is not unimportant.

That time is character development. Sparks to subplots. Silence for theatrical purposes. Depression years. The ugly and gritty stuff that makes readers put down the book. The boring and mundane. The existential dread. The staring at walls for so long the colors fade into each other and start to drift around.

Writers often gloss over the in-between times because we want to spare our readers from the boredom, the pain, the uncomfortableness of it all. I try not to, but it happens.

Just because we gloss over it, doesn’t mean nothing happened worth noting. It just means the editors (your brain) wanted the readers (YOU) to focus on more important (traumatic) things.

Real life can be found in every book. A life spent inside of books is a life lived a million different ways.

But inside of books, we don’t see the hardest stuff. We don’t truly experience what it feels like to be sitting on the couch talking to your daughter about family business as though it’s a normal Wednesday morning, but inside your head, your entire understanding of human behavior, justice, right and wrong, boundaries, morals, values, and self-worth is being obliterated by a dozen screaming voices ripping your experiences and memories apart to prove themselves in a war no part of you understands except that it is facing a future it has no concept of understanding and all it knows is that one way or another, it must move forward despite both paths being torrential.

When you’re standing at a crossroads and you’ve burned the only bridge backwards, forever is a terrifying concept.

You can sit in the dirt and kick and scream as long as you want, but eventually, you gotta pick yourself up and choose your future, even though it’s uncertain and you aren’t happy about it. If you stay in the same place, death is the consequence of inaction.

It is in these “in-between” places that I’ve found myself. One chapter has closed, another soon opens. In the interim, I sit in a quiet place and reflect on the dumpster fire that was the ending of that last chapter.

Boy, was it exciting. There were cults and guys and snakes and substance abuse and sex and risky behaviors and more impulsive decisions that most readers could have kept up with. But the chapter ended in a EF5 emotional tornado, resulting in the death of a few dreams, the end of a brief but intense marriage, the obliteration of my internal understanding of human behavior and emotional control, and a collapse in my ability to do anything more than perhaps a shower each day and maybe getting out of bed for a few hours.

The next chapter opens on Friday, when we will find ourselves back in the courtroom, finally, for the sentencing of Cason John Lee.

As I spend the next few days preparing for that nightmare, I am cleaning my house and reflecting on all the things that I have done, all the places I have been, and all the adventures I have yet to live.

The beauty of the in-between happens in those quiet stolen moments. When the crying bout stops, and the tears run dry for just a few minutes, I can see how much love existed.

When I wake up in the middle of the night and I roll over to find the bed empty, I wrap my arms around the memories and let the tears pull me back under.

With pages so full of plot twists, deception, and manipulation, that last chapter was finale-worthy. But, the book is not done, so we keep moving along.

As I prepare for the future, I make peace with the chaos that is coming and I sit with the pain.

When I was younger and terrible things happened, I fought against them. I guess I still do. But I don’t fight as hard to win anymore. Now, I fight just enough to survive.

Until Next Time

Cathy Marie