THE WRITER

XII: Happiness is Often Masked

"Someone told me that fate is a thin string holding people who believe in it close to each other in order for them to see that things happen and then there are other things that don't."

-Fate, Allie Santos

The way up to the temple is steep and cold and dreary. I feel cold air biting hard on my skin and I can't do much but rub my hands on my shoulders to provide what little warmth it could give.

The pen was lost. Somehow on the way to the hospital I had lost it. I tried tracing my way back to where I passed but I couldn't seem to find it anywhere. In just one night I had lost everything that once made me happy, the pen and Aiden.

The strange feeling of panic the moment I realized I lost it is now replaced with this some kind of pain of knowing that there are just things that are not meant for me.

"The pen, if you are wondering where it is, is with me." I jumped at the sound of the voice and when I turn around I saw a monk walking his way up to me.

"I was..."

"It has already served its purpose for you, Allie. It has already given you what you asked for," he said.

I wrap my arms tighter around me as I try to find the words that I practiced so hard on my way here. "It hasn't. I wished for happiness but I don't feel the least happy."

"You are. For now, it is only masked with the pain where you thought that you did not have what you are supposed to have."

He spoke in riddles but somehow I found a way to understand it. The wind again blows bitterly and I felt my fingers stiff in an agony of numbness.

"Come to think of it Allie, the pen has given you more than you wished for. But it will not determine your future, that isn't its purpose; you'll have to leave that with fate."

He left after saying that, and I was left alone in the steps burning with questions I do not even know if I am allowed to ask.

When I reached my apartment I saw Katie standing outside my door, pacing back and forth endlessly as if she'll never get tired of doing that.

She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw me.

"Is this about the Epilogue? I'm going to send them to you this Saturday. I just need to gather my thoughts and write an epic ending."

"There is someone named Aiden Gallego," she said, her voice in a rush. "The way they found him was the same as the one you wrote," her eyes demanded truth but I couldn't tell her the truth. She will never believe it.

"Why don't you come in?" I offered but then I remembered how shabby and odd looking and almost empty my apartment was when she came in. What a miserable life I live in she must have thought.

"Allie. The heroine's name is Allie and then Aiden," her words are jumbled into something that doesn't make sense but I understood every word. I wanted to tell her how absurd it was. How absurd it was that at some point, it was real and not a part of a book of fiction but that is a secret I am not supposed to tell.

"Look! Look at what you have written and watch the news, here I taped it!" she gave me a tale and I took it in a tired kind of way.

"I know what happened, I was the one who wrote it." I whispered without an effort of moving my lips. She didn't seem to have heard it for she continues to pace back and forth like Sherlock Holmes trying to solve a mystery.

But it has been solved long ago. And I think the monk was right. For a brief moment that Aiden was real in my world, I had felt happiness. A happiness that I had wished for. A feeling that has long ago been absent in my life that it was so painful to let it go.

The pen has served its purpose and has given me more than I could ever ask for. The pen saved Aiden. And all that's left for me to do is to turn the bad memories into nightmares that will not be clearly remembered in time, and the good ones will be kept in a small corner of my heart where it will be remembered once in a while.

I sit in my table where it all started; I place my hand under the pile of papers at the top the one where I had last written the words EPILOGUE with the pen. I imagined the pen in my hands but when I opened my eyes my fist just remained clenched hard upon nothing.

"Was it true?" she finally asked.

"It's just fiction, Katie." I said, trying to suppress a sob threatening to escape out of my throat. "It is not real." and then all of a sudden the whole world fall silent, as if subtly lamenting on something that could have been real.