“He’s going to kill me at the end of this.”

The realization settles in the same way every time. 

He’s never thought of my heart, so I don’t have one that can suddenly speed up. 

However, he’s given me anxiety — or the concept of anxiety as he experiences it. 

In the past, he’s given me bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, clinical depression and even multiple personality disorder. 

One time he even made me a psychopath — before how descriptive he became during the killing scenes made him too scared of whatever beast was seemingly being awakened by meticulously living out the details in his mind. 

My creator – right now sitting in a basement with a sunburn on his bald head because he’s not very good at forethought – is a writer who hates his own writing. 

That has to be it. 

Or he wouldn’t keep doing this to me. 

The endless revisions. 

The cruel carousel of ways he’s killed me. 

Because he always does. 

I could open the idea of a mouth he pictures for me in his mind to scream because I’m trapped in this unshakeable reality, this never-ending repetition of being created only for the purpose of being killed in whatever way my creator feels is satisfying on any given day. 

But he’s never imagined or even thought of me having vocal cords, so I can’t.

I know that because … well, do you know what it’s like to feel like you’re screaming “at the top of your lungs” and there’s only silence? 

To try to beg for mercy, and realize that you were never given a voice? 

I’ve had a wife and children he never let me tell I loved them before he erased them. 

He’s given me children that I had to watch “die” through the hazel eyes he gave me matching his own, holding them in the frail arms of his father that he’s placed on the chaos of loosely connected parts that is my body. 

Sometimes this leads directly to my death. 

The weightless, incorporeal nothingness that is me has been forced to feel the grooves of a rope tightening and burning as it cuts into my neck as I’m pulled down hard enough for it to choke me simply by my creator’s desire to see it happen on the page. 

These are the times he pictures me, at least for a moment, looking exactly like himself. 

 The last time, he had some random person mug me and shoot me in the head in an alley I’d cut through by my house to grab a Snickers and popcorn for my daughter from the market down the street before we watched a movie with my wife.

I knew it was coming. I tried to choose another path. But I don’t have free will. 

If he doesn’t write it, it can’t happen. 

It’s like when I try to scream. 

He’s never let me. 

This time around, I don’t have a wife and kids. I live alone with a cat. 

He’s given me a backstory of addiction and being the victim of sexual assault. He has also given me parents he killed while I was at work. 

And he created a woman who I was going to marry … before she decided she actually couldn’t love me, you know, for whatever “forever” is to a real person. 

All of that and a number of other mental health ticking time bombs let me know that he’s going to choose suicide again for me this time. 

Right on cue, he’s placed me in a car, driving towards Lake Michigan.

 I’m looking for a place where I can easily and dramatically drive my car off into the lake and drown myself. 

Suddenly, I can feel something in my chest. 

A pulsing sensation flows from a moving mass in my chest all the way to tan arms and fingers just below my skin before circling back. For the first time, I feel the warmth of blood rushing through veins and the warmth of being human. 

A breath escapes my mouth as my chest and newly-conceived lungs start rising and falling as he starts describing my calm breathing slowly speeding up as I spot the perfect place that my car can speed through and land in the lake just like he wants me to. 

I start hyperventilating as my arms jerk to the right and my car leaves the roadway, falls briefly and lands hood first into the water. 

The heat of the body he’s given me is replaced by the icy and uncomfortable sensation of the cold liquid of Lake Michigan making its way up my legs, and I know that the warmth won’t return again this time. 

As it rises to my mouth, he lets me take one last breath of air, one last feeling of normal life before another cruel death. 

The chaotic cluster of tissue in my chest is beating hard enough that I’d be concerned I’d die from a heart attack if I wasn’t already killing myself — or, rather, being murdered.

My lungs burn, a brand new and horrible feeling.

Water rushes into my mouth and fills my lungs until they become a small, but overflowing reservoir. 

Then, nothing. 

This is my favorite part. The only moment I’m truly free.

It doesn’t last long. 

He’s just re-reading it before he most likely starts it all over again.

But, somewhere between finished product and revision, I’m a happily dead character on a page. 

Because it’s not dying that bothers me. 

It has never been the fact that he’s going to kill me that gets under my skin.

It’s having to live again. 

It’s him never letting my story finally be done, never being willing to let me go.

Because he’s going to bring me back. 

He always does. 

It’s only a matter of time before he decides he’s still not done with me.

Any moment now, he’s going to delete every word he’s written before typing out that one familiar sentence as a thought in my head. 

It’s the same thought he’s given me at the start of the story every time — simply because he wants me to know it’s going to happen from the very beginning.