A fading Hope chapter 15

Song

Endless Night from the Lion King (stage show)

( Lyrics and discussion will be in a separate post)

This chapter was hard to write.

The Sunday I began it, I saw a woman I hadn’t spoken to for seven years, when she and her daughter pretty much destroyed my life. I don’t want to go into details, but because of their actions, my trust and faith in people was shattered and is still healing. I became very depressed. Seeing her brought back memories and emotions I’ve tried to keep locked away.

The same emotions- hopelessness, despair, loss- that were key to this chapter.

So yeah.

Story.

This was the Core of the story. So let’s talk about that.

Unlike pretty much every other story I’ve ever written, this one didn’t come from a scene. as I said when I was talking about A Captive Light’s core, I had a scene- I knew that Kari was going to have been kidnapped, someone was going to take a blast for her, her crest was going to react.

For this one, when I started thinking, “Ok, I have that one loose end to deal with. hmm” I didn’t have anything.

While walking back from church one day over a year ago, I came up with not a scene, but an image. T.K., alone, in the Dark ocean. with the scene came one word: Hopeless.

I had a lot of work to do to get from that single word and image to the story you’ve been reading. I spent the rest of December plotting it out.

Moving on, this is something important to me. All of my works have one or both of two themes: the power of friendship and loyalty, and the battle between hope and despair.

I use these for different reasons.

The first one- that someone would do anything for a friend- is in Fading Hope, but mostly in Captive Light. I use this theme, because I never had it in my life. I had “friends” but most of them were just cousins I saw once every few months, or people who wouldn’t tease me at school. I had no one I could really talk to, no one who would do for me what my characters, both in fanfiction and in my other works, do for each other. So I write what I didn’t have. I’m very blessed to have people I consider my true friends now.

The second theme I use because it’s a constant in my life. I have Hypomania, type two bipolar, and have battled depression for seven years. Really, it all goes back to the woman and her daughter I mentioned earlier. I was badly bullied in middle school and high school wasn’t a ton better. So I battled. I’m on medication now, but for six and a half years it was just me, trying to keep faith and hope. Bi polar is a funny thing. I would Know in my head everything would be fine in a week, but I couldn’t believe it in my heart.

And that’s what A Fading Hope is about. It’s about loss, it’s about meeting despair, it’s about falling- and it’s about hope.

Like I said, I become whatever character I’m writing. So as I wrote this, I revisited those feelings- of uncertainty, of utter and complete hopelessness and despair. Of thinking” It’s over. there is nothing I can do to make this better. there is no way I can go on.” It was hard. I was pretty emotional shaken after I finished ( the meds still worked. i’m fine, don’t worry :) ) but it was really important to write, because- that was it, the core of the story. T.K, in the dark ocean and his world is in tatters and this is his darkest hour, his despair event horizon.

I tried to draw on my own life for his words and thoughts, digging through old poems, facebook posts, journal entries. I’m sorry if it doesn’t fit or work well or is too repetitive- his thoughts and the text are modeled after my own thought patterns during my lows, and are thus not really coherent.

I hope I got the message across.

This was dark. T.K. is in the dark ocean with only Patamon- the first draft didn’t even give him that. I took pity on him. ish. He has lost hope. I know it is out of character- but not, I think, for this story, which is darker than the show. and in the last few hours, all the hopes he had were shattered when his friends got captured, and then when he couldn’t do anything to save them or Kari.

The dream is shamelessly inspired by Tamora Pierce’s book Squire( Tamora Pierce is amazing. seriously, just go read something by her.)- the main character faces an Ordeal to become a knight and has to face her worst fears, and one of them is reliving a situation where she saved her friends but this time she’s frozen with fear and they all die. I borrowed the Idea. It’s not mine.

Most of what T.K. is feeling- the numbness, the emptiness, everything being big and cold but tears- is what I feel when I have my lows. I tried to be realistic. 

Um yeah.

Wow, that was really dark.

It get’s better, guys. Spoilers: I love happy endings.

I’m not saying everything will work out, but there is Hope. It’s all going to get - better -.

I am a creature prone to happy endings, and there’s still a few chapters left.

hold to that.

next chapter will be up in a week, give or take.

Hedgi.