He won’t read it

I lost my dearest friend this week.

We wrote together for years — screenplays, mostly. The kind of work where you sit side by side, arguing over a line for half an hour, then suddenly it clicks and you both know it’s right. He was maddening like that. Slow where I was fast. Stuck where I wanted to move on. And then, just as I was ready to give up, he’d find something better than I’d imagined.

We drove each other mad.

But he was my writing partner.

There’s something very particular about being read by someone like that. Not politely read, not encouraged — seen. He could tell when I was hiding, when I’d gone for the easy version, when something hadn’t landed. And he cared enough to push.

Years ago, when I’d drifted away from writing, he didn’t let it go. Not in a big way. Just a quiet, persistent belief that I should be doing it. That I hadn’t finished.

So I went back.

I started the novel I’m now just about finishing.

And now he’s gone.

I don’t quite believe it yet.

It feels strange even writing that. Too blunt for what it is.

He’ll never read it.

I find myself thinking about that more than anything else. Not in a dramatic way — just in small moments. When I change a line. When something finally works. When I think, he’d have liked that, or he’d have argued with this.

That conversation has just… stopped.

Or maybe not stopped. Just one-sided.

I can still hear him, if I’m honest. The questions he’d ask. The places he wouldn’t let me get away with something. That voice is in the work now, whether I like it or not.

Writing feels like the only way I can still be in that conversation.

Which means, in a way, he is too.

I don’t know yet what it means to finish something he won’t see. Part of me wants to slow down, as if not finishing keeps something open. And another part knows the opposite is true.

He’s one of the reasons this book exists at all.

So I’ll finish it.

Not neatly. Not with any sense of closure. But properly.

*****

I’m Carole, a Somatic Life Coach and writer.

If you’d like to follow my writing journey, I’m posting about it in My Novel Year here