The writer is dying. No, not tha kind of death that we know and fear.
It is a different kind of death, one that will put someone to his own personal hell while alive. Oh, hell, fire and shoot!
Somehow, it ends like this, he thought to himself as he read Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Ground" His mood was depressing as the novel in his hands. There's no such thing as keeping a secret. It will found out sooner or later, as he have found out.
The artist's guild is dying because of him. Almost every member is after his neck. Heads will roll, as the dean said. And death was a woman, a sterneyed one with a stare that can make you fele like you are some kind of Play Doh Clay. Great! What a kind of wisecracks can he formulate next? But then, he's just stuck with wisecraking now. He's got nothing else, not with his honor destroyed.
The writer is quite goodlooking. Six feet tall, with long hair and oily muscies... and smoker's cough. He had been working out, trying to pour out his anger and frustration on the barbells and dumbbells and what other bells that use. He wants to kill himself and get it over with.
He's suffering that much is true. But then again, he wants to fight back, to redeem himself. Yet it is virtually impossible. Plagarism is the worst crime that a writer can commit and the stain that comes with it can never really go away. It like leprosy. Even when cured, the stigma is still attached.
Shit, he said to himself, what made me do this presumptuous thing? What made me think that I can get away with it?
How was he discovered? In the writer's workshop in Dumaguete University! He was discovered by a panelist who happened to have a copy of the sotry that he copied from. And he was never again forgiven for it.
Oh, pity, he had plenty. But htere is an unspoken rule against what he commited, a rule that efery writer follows. And his sympathizers were not exempted to that rule,the rule of honorable competition in writing.
He fought unfairly, yes, he deserved to be punished. And what he's going through right now is hell enough. The guilt, the knowledge that he would never be trusted again, never be accepted again in the inner circle of the campus writers anywhere.
He was persecuted by almost everyone he knows. Even his so-called friends left him, only a few remained. The few who do not condone what he did but commiserated with him. He was disgraced. He can imagine the whisperings at the back by the people who consider him a traitor to his vocation as writer. All he wanted was a little recognition, maybe some personal glory, but he realized that it does not justify what he did and realized it too late.
Teary-eyed, he closed his Russian novel and went up to his bedroom. He stared at his typewriter, sat down in front of it. He remembered the greatest moments of his writing career was spent on this cold metal machine, the thing that have been his best friend. He recalled the follies of his action when he used this machine to copy another writer's hard work. He betrayed this machine which did nothing but serve him. He remembers it all. Then he broke down and wept unshamedly, with nothing to embrace except the lifeless machine in front of him.
Slowly he stood up, lifter the typewriter and climbed up the roof of his house. He looked at the stars in sky, the full moon and the vacnat lot besides his dwelling. Then he flung the typewriter down with all his might. He heared it crash toward the ground, and with it, his guilt, the knowledge that its over finished. The writer died when the typewriter was destroyed. All that is left is the man who stared again at the moon with eyes that blazed with fire from his dar, tortured soul.
He listened to the silence of the night with mosquitoes buzzling around, oblivious to him as they flew around.... and around.
He shouted with all his might. "The writer is dead." And so it was finished.
