MHI: A SKETCH OF HOPE by Ryan C. Countrymen

Trigger Warning: This piece addresses mental health

The HWA is pleased to launch its Mental Health Initiative, a coordinated roll-out of events, resources, and activities intended to promote positive mental health, foster the concept of hope, and challenge the stigma of mental illness in the horror genre. The initiative, run by the organization’s Wellness Committee, launches in June, and includes the following blog posts from Of Horror and Hope, a downloadable anthology of poems, flash fiction, and personal reflections on mental health by HWA members.

A SKETCH OF HOPE
Ryan C. Countrymen

From my imagination onto a sheet of paper, flowing through the graphite of a number two pencil, I sketch the protagonist in a story I have yet to write. Scratches and swirls, lines both light and dark, merge to form a sad, twenty-something woman with a pale complexion and freckles. She has no name yet, but what she does have is all the baggage I carry—loneliness, anxiety, and the perpetual ache of never being good enough. She’s a proxy for the torment that stirs within me. She’ll slay the monsters in the fictional world I create for her, the monsters I’m unable to slay in my own world.

I sketch the last wisps of her hair, she blinks and gasps for air, coming alive on paper, a birth of sorts. She’s frantic, frenetic, scratching at the edge of the paper, attempting to comprehend her sudden sense of being. Her hundreds of sketched lines dart around the page like a haphazardly scrawled flipbook.

Her eyes lock onto mine. Is that anger? Her sketched hands grow in the frame of the paper as they reach for me, breaching the two-dimensional plane, wrapping around my neck and pulling me into the page. My body, now a messy scribble of lines itself, is toe to toe with my creation. Defenseless against her advance, I close my eyes and brace for my demise.

But, there’s no violence.

Instead, a morphine warmth washes over as she embraces me. She tells me it’s going to be okay, that, together, we’ll be fine.

When my eyes open, I’m staring down at the paper. My creation stares back, a content smile on her face, wet spots dotted about her head from where my tears fell. I thank her because I know, together, we will indeed be fine.