Brutally Beautiful

Author’s Note:

The words I’ve strung together on these few pages are a world to many readers. These words carry so many different messages to every one of us. In fact, the world I saw in my head will be greatly different from the one you read in yours. That’s the magic of the imagination. The story you read will be judged by your experiences, drenched with your history, your past, and your own pains. I began writing this story because the character of Samantha (which I strangely named after my dog, don’t fucking ask) popped into my head as an image of a woman covered in blood sitting behind a steering wheel. It played in violent loops in my brain. Then Kade entered with his violent flashbacks and visions. I fell hard for both of them. They both have a brutality to their lives that not many people, thank God, have been touched with. Not every story is pretty, not every story is perfect, but this is their story; one that the characters dictated and I just sat back and typed. Their story is quite brutally beautiful. The situations that these two people are in are quite real. These are stories that are on the news. I hear them in my subconscious and I research them until I understand the psyche and reasons behind the actions and emotions. I have spent numerous hours, obsessing and reading victims’ accounts, memoirs, police reports; you name it, I researched it. In real life, you can’t control the story. You can’t make your wishes appear and give everybody a happily-ever-after. Yet, as I was in Kade’s mind, experiencing the chaos and pain, I couldn’t think of anything I could give him other than hope and love.

So here is to victims and underdogs, may you find peace and calmness in your life. We are strong. Just because we’ve been under the hand of violence, it does not make us weak. It makes us see life clearer than others, and it makes us breathe harder.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Aristotle