The deadline wasn't for a publisher. It was for me.
Nineteen is the age when the world is supposed to open up. It was the age when the last door had finally slammed shut for me.
I sat in my dim apartment, staring at the ceiling fan spinning above me. It groaned with a rhythmic, taunting beat, a constant reminder of how alone I was. On the floor, the remains of what I had once been foolish enough to call my career lay in tatters – five manuscripts, each one accompanied by the same cold, impersonal rejection letter in a slightly different font.
"Your art shows promise, but your storytelling lacks the maturity we look for. Perhaps try again in a few years."
"The market is currently oversaturated with this genre. Not a fit for our magazine."
"Your style is too dark. Shonen readers want hope."
I wanted to scream that I had no hope left to give them. That I had run out five years ago, in the back of a black sedan that smelled of rain and funeral flowers. My parents had left me a small inheritance and a huge, empty space in my soul. I had put the pain into the ink. I had started working three jobs at fourteen, quit school at sixteen to pursue this dream, thinking that if I could just write a story that mattered, the space would fill.
But the inheritance was gone. The part-time jobs had disappeared as the economy went south. And the "promising" artist was now just a starving nineteen-year-old in a room he couldn't afford.
I examined the stool more closely. It was a cheap, three-legged assistant I had used in the past to reach the high shelves where I stored my extra paper. Now, it stood directly under the ceiling fan, humming quietly in the quiet room.
My hands were steady as I tied the knot. It was the steadiness that was the most frightening—the calm. Years of precise, almost surgical concentration had taught me to observe every minute detail: the precise angle of a character's jaw in a drawing, the way the shadows fell and deepened with the light. I called on that same precise skill now. The rope in my hands was nylon, blue and rough to the touch, the fibers resisting each other with a stiff, stubborn quality.
"I'm sorry," I whispered to the empty room.
I wasn't sure who I was apologizing to. My parents, for wasting the life they gave me? The publishers, for not being good enough? Or maybe to the characters in my sketches, the ones who would never get to see their own endings?
I stepped up onto the stool.
From up here, the apartment looked even smaller. The ink stains on my fingers were permanent, a mark of a trade that had rejected me. My neck felt cold. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the smell of my mother's cooking or the sound of my father's laugh, but all I could see was the white space of an empty page.
I didn't want to be a background character anymore. I didn't want to be the "tragic backstory" for someone else's success. I just wanted the silence.
With a sharp, final movement, I kicked the stool.
The world didn't fade to black instantly. There was a violent, searing pressure. A desperate, reflexive kick of my legs. A frantic, primal realization that the body wants to live even when the soul has given up. The creak of the fan became a roar in my ears.
I'm sorry, I thought again, more frantically this time. I changed my mind. I—
Then, the snap.
The ink spilled. The page went black. And for the first time in nineteen years, the deadline was met.