The Book of In-Between

You’re here because you like to read. Right? Why else would you spend your time perusing the rantings of a no-name, twenty-something aspiring writer? I know we’re in the midst of a pandemic, and it’s not like we all have very much else to do, but still. Television streaming exists, and you chose this instead. For that matter, staring at the wall and pondering the meaning of life is also a possibility—as is watching grass grow—yet here you are. I’m honored.

If my assumption holds, and you are, in fact, an avid reader, let me then also presume that in all of your reading, you’ve probably come across the trope of the all-powerful Book. You know: the one that holds mystical, life-altering abilities, located by a protagonist early on in their heroic journey? The one that changes that same protagonist’s life by boosting their innate potential to give them the juicy, dramatic character transformation that we all fantasize about?

Of course, there are Books of life, and there are Books of death. Myriad versions of each exist in different cultures, religions, movies, etc., and we have learned to treat these with the utmost respect. Gravitas. These are the Books that decide who stays and who goes, who persists and who fails. These are the Books that haunt our dreams, or our nightmares.

What if I told you, though, that the fairy tales are wrong, and the motivational speakers downright delusional. Fate is fate, and no Book can change that. We, as humans, have no control over our penultimate providence.

But we do have the power to decide how we get there.

What if the one Book that mattered most was the Book that no one ever mentioned, the one that lived in shrouded secrecy for generations until finally, one day, this protagonist stumbled upon it?

To explain, I have to share a little story. My story.

At this point, you may be asking yourself why I of all people have been selected to unveil this particular mystery of the universe. Fair point, and I'm sorry to say that I don’t have an answer for you. Who knows why it was me? Who knows why it’s ever anybody? Some people get bitten by radioactive spiders; I happened to pick the right book out of the library sale stack. Go figure.

After being shut down for months due to the pandemic, my local library staged a limited re-open featuring a stacked inventory clearance. Nestled among the beat-up paperbacks and filled-in handwriting workbooks was a book that looked oddly intact. Black, cloth-bound, sturdy— clean. It didn’t belong, and I was shocked that no one else had found it yet. When I took it to the makeshift register, the ancient librarian said that she had never seen it before, then promptly charged me half a dollar for it.

Elated, I threw the book in my bag, where it sat neglected for a few weeks before I decided to stop procrastinating and get to work on my novel. When I finally opened it back up, though, it was no longer blank. Instead, unfamiliar handwriting scrawled across the front page in black ink said the following: “Tomorrow, you will break your leg.”

Um, ok. I hadn’t written that, and I didn’t think that anyone had access to my bag. Was this a threat?

I stared at it for a moment, then decided to to use my own pen to cross it out. Almost immediately, the line repeated itself underneath the first scribble.

I took it as a challenge. I ripped out the whole page, then lobbed it at the nearest trash can. As soon as I flipped to the next page, the same statement popped right back up again.

This was war. Pursing my lips, I decided to reply to the mystery writer. “NO,” I wrote on the next line.

“No is not an option,” the handwriting faded into view in the same scratchy handwriting. “What you can choose is how.”

Who died and made ghostwriter over here king?

“Fine,” I wrote back to my new invisible friend. “I will break my leg in the metaphorical sense.” See, ghost-thing, I can be snarky too. “Tomorrow, I will have extra luck when pitching my story idea to my editor, and she’ll give me the front page slot.” Without waiting for feedback, I shut the book and considered the possibility that I was out of my mind.

The next day, I had all but forgotten about the cursed little notebook and scrambled to prepare my pitch before the big meeting. My editor, who usually reacts to my ideas with the same level of enthusiasm as the average person does when they’re told they’ll have to undergo emergency root canal, swept into the room in a huff. I didn’t even bother speaking until she pointed at me directly and barked “Go.” I squeaked out a couple of lines, and the room went silent. “I love it,” she said. “Do this right and you can nab front page. Get moving.”

Reeling, my mind flashed back to the notebook. It’s just a fluke, I assured myself. Making sure no one else was watching, I flipped the book back open. Nothing. Just as I started to pinch the pages shut, the writing appeared again.

“Tomorrow, you will learn how to speak an entirely new language.”

Alright then, I thought to myself. I see how it is. I can’t change these words, but I can alter their meaning. I can manipulate the in-between. Let’s do this.

“Tomorrow, I will send an online test to my boyfriend. The one that tells you what your love language is. Once he takes it, I’ll read his answers, and learn the ins an outs of an entirely new language to me.” Ha! That wasn’t too bad. Sure beats trying to write in a way to absorb all of Latin or Swahili in 24 hours.

You can guess what happened the next day, so I won’t bore you with the endless renditions of this back-and-forth battle of wills between me and the notebook I eventually came to think of as my friend. The Book of In-Between. My daily adventures, spurred by this Book, make for light reading, and this, unfortunately, is not meant to be a light story. It is meant to be a cautionary tale, one about the inherent power of words—especially those written by hand.

Confused? Let’s consider, for a moment, the abundance of inspirational quotes, or societal adages, that encourage us to “speak our truth” or “tell our story.” You know the drill. We all do. As children, we are urged to memorize the spelling of our names then share them with everyone we meet. We are encouraged to always leave a legacy, a signature, paper remnants of our presence on Earth. These inclinations have been a part of our nature for so long that we never really paused to consider where they came from. Or why they came to us. As mortals, we resigned ourselves to our inevitable deaths, to the seeming spontaneity of our existences, without realizing that our chance to re-write our destinies was staring us in the face all along.

When I came into possession of the Book of In-Between (or, more accurately, when it came into possession of me), I slowly began to realize the sheer power of our words. Of our handwritten intentions. In each new page of the Book that I opened, I was given a solid fact; something that I had no agency to change. Yet when I chose to describe how it happened, I reclaimed some sort of control over my own life again. In the right hands, a blank page becomes a weapon, a tour de force. In the wrong hands, it never lives up to its potential, and its owner succumbs to their supposed fate.

Still with me? Why not? You think it doesn’t make sense. That, if given the chance, everyone would write themselves the best possible storyline, or make themselves the hero of their own book.

Wrong.

How many humans, when given all of the potential harnessed in the world, opt to self-destruct? How many people spend their time feeling like an imposter in their own life story? How many people have the resources to alter the course of humanity forever, only to splurge it all on their vice du jour? Just because you have a chance to succeed, doesn’t mean that you will. Honestly, how do you think the Book got to me in the first place? I shudder to think of what happened to its previous writer. This Book is what you make of it. For that matter, any notebook is what you make of it.

Still don’t believe me? Let’s walk through it together; maybe that’ll cure the skepticism. Here, I’ve made room for you. I even got you your own notebook, a classic little black number by Moleskine. Fancy.

Open it up with me—let’s see what you’ve got. Look! Your fate, all mapped out.

“Tomorrow, you will receive $20,000. Due to sweepstakes taxes, it ends up being closer to $10,000.”

Wow. Lucky. Be careful, though. Your words have more potential than you know. Better not pick something that could cast suspicion on your character, like a suspicious random inheritance windfall or a lottery win. Write in some evidence. Make it good, so that no one can take it away from you. What reason could you personally have to win such a large sum of money?

There you go. Take a deep breath. Oh! You’ve written your answer. Let’s see…."I will enter an online writing competition….”