Was it me?
The screen glares back at me — blank, empty.
Still, I sit here, thinking. Thinking. Thinking.
No inspiration. No light.
How many more days will I wander like this?
How many more nights will I scratch at the walls of my mind, desperate to find the thing I was born to do?
I want to show the world that I am a writer.
That I am something.
Anything.
It’s been a year since I posted my last book on Wattpad.
Readers: 2.
Jack left a comment: “Rhea’s tits are just his type.”
I was writing a rape scene.
I have written four books.
Each one a bleeding truth.
Each one a wound left open to the air.
The first told the story of a man who murdered his father — not out of hate, but because he couldn’t stop the voices.
Other was about woman torn apart by rape, stitched back together only to keep breaking.
Another — followed an army officer who served during the Beirut explosion, August 4, 2020.
I buried myself in research, tracing the ashes of a city and the ruins of its people.
I sat across from my therapist, week after week, trying to understand the kind of grief that doesn’t even have a name.
But the last book —
Was It Me? —
was different.
It wasn’t about the world.
It was about her.
And it felt too real.
Maybe that’s why it almost killed me to finish it.
I’m late for therapy again.
Funny how easy it is to lose track of time when you’re already lost inside your head.
“How’s everything at home, Diana?” Dr. Simon asked, his voice gentle.
“Good,” I lied, smoothly.
“And your mother?”
“She’s fine too.” Another lie.
“Thank you for asking. How’s your family, Simon?”
He chuckled, soft and tired. “Busy. The grandkids are staying a while. Big move to Connecticut.”
“That’s good,” I said.
He paused, eyes shadowed.
“You’ve been writing on your body again.”
Shame prickled under my skin.
Simon was like a father figure to me. I don’t know about my father. Mother never mentions about him whenever I visit her in the hospital. Doctors say she is at the last stage of cancer. I am trying to spend as much time as possible with her.
The sessions with Simon are like father – daughter catch ups. Most of the time for sessions we met at cafes or at his house where I end up having dinner with him and his wife.
“I told you,” I muttered, “it helps me take notes.”
“You don’t need to tear your skin open to write,” he said, almost pleading. “The words are cutting deeper than you realize.”
I said nothing.
How could I tell him?
How could I explain that carving words into my skin helps me feel the stories?
To live them. To bleed them.
The session dragged on.
He reminded me about the nail-biting, the insomnia, the self-neglect.
I nodded.
I promised.
I lied.
When I got home —
I opened my laptop.
Blank screen. Heavy breath. Hollow chest.
Out of habit, I opened Wattpad and scrolled to Was It Me?
I don’t know why I named it that.
Maybe because the girl inside the story kept asking herself if everything was really happening to her.
I left the screen glowing and wandered to the kitchen.
I kept the water to boil on the stove for making instant coffee while I went to washroom to freshen up.
Cold water splashed against my face.
The mirror stared back.
“Is it really me?” I whispered to my reflection. Feeling like a stranger to myself.
I carried the coffee back, my hands trembling.
As I sat down, some spilled across my bare thighs.
I winced, expecting the sharp scald.
But when I looked —
no burn.
Just a thin, clean cut.
Was I forgetting things?
I forced my eyes back to the laptop.
Forced myself to read.
The story began with a girl, sweet and golden once, living with her parents and her brother, fifteen years older.
At first, she was too young to understand.
She watched — silent — as her father lashed out at her mother over small things.
The beatings became part of the air.
Her brother was gone, away at military training.
She was left alone to witness it all.
As she grew, the house darkened.
One night, she saw the unseeable:
her father raping her mother while his friends laughed.
Later, beaten into silence by her father for the first time, her mother whispered a more horrific truth:
Before the boy was sent away, the father had done the same to him.
The mother had helped him escape.
Hoped distance would heal him.
But the house kept rotting.
The father turned on the daughter next.
He drugged her.
He destroyed her piece by piece.
Mother and daughter became hollow bodies, surviving only because they hadn’t yet stopped breathing.
Then —
the brother returned.
He found a nightmare:
his mother and sister bleeding, tied up like animals.
His father, drunk, laughing, cutting their fleshes, leaving knife cuts everywhere and drinking blood spilling from their bodies.
Something inside him snapped.
He picked up a knife.
And in one silent, decisive moment — ended his father’s life.
Without looking at the women, he turned the blade on himself.
The story ended with two women sitting alone among the dead.
Alive, but emptied.
Breathing, but not living.
I slammed the laptop shut, tears burning down my cheeks.
I know I wrote the story.
I know I’ve read it a hundred times.
But it breaks me. Every. Single. Time.
It doesn’t feel like fiction.
It feels like a real story.
Like the words aren’t just ink — they’re blood.
As if something is attached to the story —
some spirit of pain too old and too deep to name.
I crawled into bed.
Pulled the thin blanket over me.
Tried to breathe.
Tried to sleep.
Instead, I heard it.
“Was it me?”
My eyes snapped open.
A girl’s voice — sharp, desperate.
“Was it really me?” she screamed again.
I clutched my ears.
“Was it me?”
“Was it me?”
“Was it me?”
“Was it me?”
“Was it me?”
I stumbled out of bed, bare feet hitting cold tile.
I pushed open the door into a dim, endless corridor.
Heavy doors lined the walls, each one bolted shut.
Lights flickered overhead.
The screaming wrapped around me like smoke.
I ran.
But the hallway stretched longer with every step.
No matter where I turned, the voice followed.
“Was it me?”
I dropped to my knees.
Pressed my hands against my ears hard enough to tear skin.
The voice was inside me now.
“Was it me?”
“Was it me?”
And then —
silence.
Dr. Simon watched from behind the one-way glass, arms folded, a clipboard at his side.
Diana knelt on the cold floor, rocking gently, whispering words only she could hear.
Security stood ready. Silent.
He didn’t need to check her file again.
He knew every line by heart.
Four books.
Four confessions.
Each one a map of her broken life.
The boy who killed his father.
The raped woman who couldn’t heal.
The soldier who lost his humanity.
The girl who watched her home decay into a graveyard.
Simon closed the file.
At the bottom, he wrote the final diagnosis:
Patient exhibits severe Dissociative Amnesia, Complex PTSD, and recurring hallucinatory episodes linked to suppressed traumatic memories.
All literary works are autobiographical in nature.
Full reality displacement confirmed.
Diagnosis: Irreversible.
He signed his name.
From the hallway, Diana’s voice floated up again.
“Was it me?”
Simon slipped her file into the Permanent Hold drawer.
The metal drawer slid shut with a cold finality.
He did not look back.
