Coming of age fiction
A memory buried in uncertainty.
All because she opened that book.
Harrowing and unpredictable, "Paper World" by Maureen Cummins is the story of a girl lost down a rabbit hole, trying to retrace her steps and find her way back to the surface. Will she climb and catch her breath again? Or will her paper world rip to shreds beneath her feet?
What happened to Brett Cain?
Brett had the perfect life. At least she thought she did. She was just celebrating her 25th birthday. She was about to marry her college sweetheart, Kurt. She was close with her parents, had a best friend she could rely on, and a fantastic career path all mapped out for her.
So why is she finding herself on life support just two months later? Why can't she remember? Where is Kurt? And why is a book and its contents haunting her while she lays in a hospital bed?
Get ready to dive into the compelling world of "Paper World" – a coming of age novel like no other.
Read a Chapter
Every moment that passed during that night after he left was
excruciating. The first hour was spent in silence. I lay slumped by the front
door, deflated, like a puppet who had lost its strings. I couldn’t bring myself
to move. I felt weighted down with the gravity of every sign that I’d missed.
Every clear signal that Kurt was unhappy. Any warning that we were doomed. How
had I not seen this coming? But I couldn’t bear to dissect our relationship
just yet.
It wasn’t even the bad memories that I wanted to avoid,
honestly. I would have welcomed feeling like this was for the best. What I
couldn’t survive was being swarmed with all the good ones. To think back to
those small moments with Kurt that made me feel warm – like the day that we
spent at the beach in the heat of the sun on rented scooters, zooming down the
loosened sand and racing the incoming tide. We had ended that perfectly golden
day with a six-pack of craft beer and sweet public intimacy that may have been
illegal. But, damn, it made for one hell of a story at parties. I was proud of
that moment and I loved the way that people smiled at us when we giggled at
that confession. We couldn’t keep our hands off of each other and that kind of
tenderness made people jealous. But that story was from the first year that we
met and the adventurous, love-soaked piece of us had crashed like the waves.
After what felt like an eternity, I finally pried myself
away from the inside of our front door. My two hands beneath me, I hoisted
myself up from the floor. One foot in front of the other, feeling heavy, I
collapsed onto our bed. My back to the covers, I stared at the ceiling.
“My kitchen table now, my bed,” I reminded myself aloud.
This space was no longer shared; it was now mine, and mine
alone. That thought was my breaking point, and I desperately searched for my
cellphone. I needed to call Phoebe.
Phoebe was my best friend. We met at university and hit it
off instantly, paired together in Spanish class and forced to create a disaster
of a project together. I spoke Spanish semi-fluently, it was a requirement I
take a language at the Catholic school I attended. Even though she did not,
lack of knowledge wasn’t the issue. We spent most of the time together smoking
weed in her hammock instead of working. We got a C+ on that assignment. That
day after class, we toasted our semi-passing grade with three pitchers of beer
at 2 p.m. We were inseparable ever since.
Since neither one of us had siblings of our own, as time
went on we began calling each other “twin.” We even looked alike with long,
blonde hair that sat wavy when we let it air-dry and piercing blue-green eyes,
a shade which could mimic either a calm, cloudless day or a vicious storm on
the sea, depending on our moods. Phoebe had been my beacon in life these past
eight years. And so once more, I called upon my guiding light to bring me back
to shore.
She picked up after one ring.
“Brettttt! Happy birthday, bitch! How hammered are you right
now – scale of one to ten? Anything less than nine and we’ve got
problems.”
Hearing her voice, I immediately began to cry again. The dam
I had been keeping closed for the last hour since he left had broken, and an
ocean of tears rained into the phone. I tried to speak through the cries. All
the words came out broken.
“Brett?! What the hell happened?! Are you okay?! What’s
going on? Take a breath, talk to me,” she said, alarm in her voice.
“He’s… gone, Pheebs. He… he left. It… it’s over.”
Sob after sob.
The pain wasn’t stopping, and I couldn’t keep it in.
It felt like I was decaying, slowing turning grey, from the
inside out.
Like everything would soon turn to ash, and I would blow
away with the smallest gust of wind.
“What do you mean? Who’s gone? Kurt?!” She asked with a
slight panic.
“Yeah, Pheebs,” I was pulling myself together just enough to try and explain, “he said he doesn’t want to get married. And he just… left. I don’t know what to do, I feel like I’m in a fucking nightmare.”
It all hurt too much.
“Okay, okay,
listen – you are going to get through this, Brett. I know it doesn’t seem like
it right this second, and you probably don’t want to hear it but you will. Can
you tell me what happened?”
“Honestly, I don’t think so. Shit, I don’t even fucking
know.”
“Well, did he tell you why?”
She was a science major. Prescriptive. She needed an answer.
Shit, so did I.
“No, Pheebs. I mean, not really. I know about as much as you
do, as fucked as that is.”
“Jesus,
Brett… I am so sorry. I don’t know what to say.” Her voice wavered. “What can I
do?”
“My head
hurts, my heart hurts, my fucking eyes hurt from crying. I just…wanted to hear
your voice. I’m going to drink this bottle of expensive-ass bullshit wine that
I bought us and go to bed. I’m fine, I just need this night to be over.”
I needed to get drunk.
I needed to forget.
Kurt.
“Yeah, I
totally understand. For sure, drink that bottle. Shit, drink another one. But I
want you to try your best to sleep at least a little bit. Tomorrow morning, I’m
driving to you. I’ll be there in the afternoon, okay? We can do whatever you
want. Cry, scream, eat, get high. Literally whatever you want, we can do it.
Just get some rest tonight. And if you can’t sleep – call me. I mean it, Brett.
Call me.”
She had always been this friend for me. Always ready to drop
anything to be by my side. I’d never known someone so selfless. I knew this
would be hard on her, to be comforting me through this. She was friends with
Kurt, too. They’d always been pretty close. They used to do mushrooms together
in college. On one truly ridiculous trip, they had decided to start a little
drug dealing business. It was nothing big time, just weed. It didn’t last long,
about one month in they realized they were spending more than they were making
because they kept giving deep discounts to their friends. I was their delivery
girl, and one-hundred percent part of the problem. I would smoke our product
with every “client” I visited.
Phoebe always said
that we were still her favorite people to spend time with and was quick to
accept any invitation to stay at our place. Some of my favorite memories were
with both of them next to me. I always counted myself so lucky that they were
close, too. It made everything so much easier. But I knew that no matter what,
she would feel an allegiance to me at the end of the day. We were sisters. I
didn’t want to be selfish, but I wanted that. I needed Phoebe to be on my side
in all of this.
I promised I would call if the night came to be too much,
and she promised to answer if I needed saving. We hung up the phone, and I
searched the room for the wine. That annoyingly over-priced bottle I had
purchased to celebrate my own birthday. Kurt wasn’t a big gift-giver, but I had
always looked past it. I just assumed he’d been too busy to buy me a present
this year, the card I’d received was the best indicator of that possibility. It
was the Christmas card he had forgotten to give me the past year. He had
crossed out ‘Merry Christmas’ and written ‘Happy Birthday’ over the scratches.
I thought it was funny when I had opened it before dinner, so like Kurt to
repurpose an abandoned gift. Now, looking at the haphazard writing on this
desperate, last-minute excuse for affection, I saw it for what it really
was—the perfect symbol of what our relationship had become. Lazy, lost and
lifeless.
I grabbed the wine and a bottle opener and sat back down onto the floor. I welcomed the cold sensation of the tiles on my skin. Suddenly, I was on my side, feeling the icy chill of the rock on my cheek. In that moment, I was looking under our bed. My bed. My gaze fell upon that weathered notebook I had seen in my fiancé’s arms so many times before.
My ex-fiancé.
A stranger.
I thought about how little I really knew about our relationship; how little I knew about him. The man who shared a bed with me for five years. It started to make me feel sick. For how long had he been wanting out of this relationship? Why did he want out of it? How many nights did he lay next to me thinking, “this is not the woman I want to spend my life with”? He never talked to me, he never let me know what he was thinking. He was always just writing.
Writing.
What if that little leather notebook held the answers?
Without taking another moment to consider what I was doing it was already in my
hands. Feeling the tattered edges, I was comforted. Kurt was in my hands.
I knew that what I was doing was the biggest form of
betrayal fathomable. I was, without permission, peering over the enormous walls
that Kurt had built from day one around his soul. I figured he had shattered my
soul and that was without my permission, as well. So, I unfastened the twine
that secured its pages, and I opened it. The sensation of the cover on my
fingers felt like I had something sacred in my hands¬—something that would
either bless me or curse me with what lie in its pages. Like it housed illicit
knowledge, the forbidden fruit. I may be naked for eternity after taking a
bite, but I couldn’t turn back now. I peeled back the front cover and couldn’t
believe what I read.
It was incredible. Every single word. Somehow both forceful
and delicate. It was like seeing Kurt, really seeing him, for the first time.
And that was a magical gift, one I had been craving since the night at that
hookah bar. Kurt may not have been able to communicate, verbally, all that he
felt. But give that man a pen and he spoke chronicles. His verses could move
mountains. And in this wonderfully elusive moment, his words moved me.
The first poem that caught my eye was about his love of escaping the world with whatever book he was devouring most recently. Entitled Paper World, the moniker he eventually gave the notebook itself, the poem was strikingly poignant. It was both beautiful and distressing.
paper world
i have read so many books
i have devoured so many words
i have dove into so many worlds.
each time I turn the final page
-i pause-
-i feel-
i relish the last moments of total submersion.
because these worlds explored
these lives lived
these tales told
are all a means of escaping my own.
and each time
I leave a paper-world
i am sure
that I will never detach
my soul from its pages
with each
book I read
i leave a
part of myself
within the binding.
I never knew how hard reality had become for him, or when he
had lost the lightness he once possessed. Why was the “real world” so hard to
enjoy now? When I met Kurt, I knew he loved to lose himself within a book. I
did, too. But he also enjoyed the life that surrounded him. We used to spend
summer days at the trails by our student apartment housing, with nothing but a
joint and our hiking boots. Some days, we would even leave our phones in the
car, just to be that much more removed from society. It would be so
overwhelmingly hot that we’d eventually strip down to our bare skin and soak
our bones in the cool, cleansing water of the nearest spring. That was how he
first got poison ivy, and I found my first tick hitching a ride on my upper
thigh.
I missed those days, and I missed Kurt
even more.
Kurt.
I turned a few more pages, attempting to soak in every letter, every touch of ink to paper. I yearned to know more about went on in his heart, and in exactly what moment I had left it. I found another one, about halfway through the notebook. And upon reading it, I realized: this one, these words were about me. It was short, but it spoke volumes.
fleeting
they shared their secrets
and their souls
with the fire of the sun
and the calm of the moon
that rested ever so out of reach that night.
but it graced their
every movement
with something so pure
he wouldn’t give it a name
for fear that it might gain wings
and leave forever.
My heart was so miserably full—it was
brief in words, but an epic in emotion. Until this evening, when he told me we
were so irreversibly broken, I felt that the most beautiful aspect of our
relationship was our ability to say so much without saying anything at all. I
knew when I was in his arms that he held me tightly because he loved me,
without any words needing to be said. And now I knew that he did so because he
was afraid I would one day fly away. He left because he was just scared of
having his own heart broken. That wasn’t something that was unfixable. I could
show him that I wouldn’t leave. We could stay in the light of the moon, sharing
secrets, forever.
Tears pooling in my eyes and silently streaming down my face, I turned another few pages. I had to read more about what he felt in the moments when his lips would not betray him. When his mind retreated as deeply as possible behind those towering, secure walls. I read another poem. This one gave me chills.
truth/lie
people tell a lot
of little white lies.
but this one isn’t light.
its dark.
so dark, in fact,
that it steals away
all the beauty
of so many things
you’d told me before.
steals and swallows
our memories
and rewrites them with a murky pen.
all because of one truth
that easily could have been a lie.
and we’d all be better for it.
What the hell could that possibly have
been about? What lie was Kurt struggling with, and why was the truth so much
harder to swallow? I tried to think back to any major life experiences that had
thrown him for a loop. I knew he had a rocky relationship with his parents.
They were both extremely religious and were overtly displeased with his
lifestyle, typical WASPs who drank constantly but turned their noses up to our
marijuana use. To add insult to injury, we were living together and unmarried.
They wanted us to fit into their box and “living in sin” wasn’t acceptable. But
they had been so overjoyed to find out we were engaged, and even happier to
hear that we had planned on having children. His mother even pulled me aside
during Thanksgiving to gently remind me that their table was big enough to pull
up another seat. Was this heated poem indicative of some new altercation that I
had somehow missed?
A bit more aggressively than I meant it, I turned the pages of his ‘paper world’. I ripped the edge of one of the pages. Oh no, Kurt. Cursing my panic, I attempted to tend to the tear. On this page, I found another poem he wrote, a bit more recently by its placement in the notebook. I stopped my frantic and entirely useless attempt to fix the page once I read its title. An Unsent Letter. It read:
No matter what stretch of time
or distance passes between us,
my heart knows one thing:
no one will ever know my soul
the way that you did.
not a day passes by
that this thought
doesn’t cross my mind.
our time can never be erased,
and the imprint you left on me
can never be lessened.
it would be easier if it could be
and I often wish for that relief.
but, as the days draw to a close,
i am constantly left with that same realization:
you were wholly mine
and I was wholly yours.
And it was beautiful.
It was a love letter. But it wasn’t to me.
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