Welcome back to “The Story Behind the Stories.” A series in which I take you through the journey of where the idea for my stories came from, and why I wrote them. Some have a particular meaning behind them, while others were taken from a true-life event I experienced, with a little dramatic license added where needed.

Short stories are where it all started for me when I embarked on this writer’s journey. When coming up with ideas, I wanted to craft something meaningful. I didn’t want to just create a bland story that had nothing behind it. I wanted to make an impact with my writing. Either profound or for basic entertainment. I wanted what I wrote to matter.

This is the tale behind what turned out to be the hardest story that I’ve written to this day.

This is the story behind The Forgotten.

As I’ve said before, when I started writing, I began with short stories just to prove to myself that I could sit down and craft a coherent narrative from beginning to end.

The easiest way for me to do that was to take it out of my life. Experiences that I had, I mean, they wrote themselves at that point. I just needed to articulate the events.

After writing The Trip and A Changing of Times (more on that story in another post), I needed to find another idea. I bounced around several events and topics I wanted to cover. I kept coming back to one event no matter how many times I pushed it from mind.

I wanted to be impactful with my writing, but I didn’t want to get too personal. I didn’t want too much of myself out there in the world. However, despite every effort, the event circled my brainstorming like a hurricane that wouldn’t ever let up.

I finally gave in and wrote the story.

Though how does one write about something that affected their life in such a dramatic and personal way and that involves many other people and do it justice? Not to take a tragedy and try to turn it into something that may be disrespectful to the others involved. It’s a fine line to walk. One that I hope I achieved.

In life, we have several dozen events that happen to us that are so impactful that they become life-altering. Their experiences shift the stream of time and create a new timeline in which we now exist. One that if not happened would’ve resulted in us living a life that would be so unrecognizable to our current one.

This is one such event, one that etched itself into me in a way I could never forget.

Spoilers ahead, so if you’ve neither read nor watched the YouTube video for The Forgotten, I recommend you do so, then come back to this post.

The Forgotten takes the reader on a journey through Kyle, the protagonist of the story’s memory of a tragic event that took the lives of two friends when he was a young boy. A memory that he’d suppressed for years until watching a newscast of a similar event trudged up those memories.

Throughout the story, he is confronted by the event, and it sends him spiraling into a series of emotions in which he blames himself for what happened. That somehow if he’d made a different decision everyone would be alive. He is consumed with guilt.

As the story unfolds and he descends deeper into this feeling of guilt, he decides that to atone for his mistakes he must end his own life.

At the last second, he sees the error in his judgment and decides not to pull the trigger. Instead, he forgives himself at the end. Something that is very challenging to do when facing those emotions of guilt, or as it’s sometimes called, survivor’s guilt.

Why did I live, and my friends did not?

A question that many people who have survived tragic accidents ask themselves on repeat. It can become all-consuming for some people. Support groups exist to help people process these tragedies.

Survivors’ guilt exists, and its cause is debated.

The reason I didn’t want to write this story is that, though a portion of it, I crafted to enhance the feelings and create a larger emphasis on the fact that we can’t blame ourselves for outcomes that we cannot control. And the opening and closing events in the story are fictional.

The core event that transpires in the story is not made up.

Kyle’s memory is my memory.

When I was younger, I lost one friend in a tragic accident. Another survived, but afterward we were never the same. In fact, my life changed that day.

The friend who passed away in the accident was my best friend’s little brother, and by some extension a little brother to me. The individual who survived, though injured, was another very close friend.

In the immediate aftermath of the accident, I blamed myself for what happened. I had been the oldest in the group. The one who the parents of the group entrusted with keeping the group together and safe that day.

I felt as though I had failed.

One person died, and others had their lives changed forever.

People assured me I was not at fault, absolving me of blame. However, that wasn’t true. I blamed myself, despite everyone telling me they didn’t blame me. I saw my best friend pull away from me. My other friend, the one who survived, stopped talking to me in the months afterward.

That day, I lost three friends. Multiple lives were altered forever because of the decisions I made.

I didn’t realize until years later that the choices made that day, however avoidable or unavoidable, were made with the best of intentions, and no one has a crystal ball to see into the future.

I, nor anyone else, can control what happens. We don’t control life as much as we think we do. It comes at us fast and hard, and we do the best we can. Make the best decisions that we can with the information available to us.

The fact is that life just happens. Whether we want to see it as cosmic fate pre-destined or a path laid out for each of us by the creator deity, we choose to believe in. Or we are all agents of free will and thus have some control over what we do. We can’t control other’s actions, nor do we know what the plan is for us.

We live the best we can, do the best we can.

Why did I have a hard time writing The Forgotten?

It’s because I struggled for years with the reasons it all happened. As I put myself back in the event’s mindset, part of me still blames myself. Though I know I shouldn’t. I can’t help it.

The reason I wrote it eventually is that I wanted to articulate for anyone who may read and resonate with the story that, no matter how much we want to blame ourselves for what life throws at us, we shouldn’t, because we are not the arbitrators of all. We control nothing outside of ourselves, and the things we do are not done in a vacuum. It takes the decisions of billions to conspire to create the events that happen every day.

While some of these events are tragic, we mustn’t put it on ourselves and trust, if we must, that there is a plan for why these things happen.

To all who may have a sense of guilt or blame for something that happened in the past. Cut yourself some slack; you don’t control everything.

I’ve left a lot of information vague, and that is by design. I don’t want to trivialize what happened, or turn it into something for notoriety, and out of respect for the other parties involved.

I wanted to convey only that sometimes there’s no blame to assign. That life will be filled with moments of joy, happiness, sadness, and sorrow, but that’s what makes life, life. It’s what makes it even more important to live it to the fullest, because we don’t know when it’ll come to an end.

Our task is not to let our worst moments define us or to cause us to live in guilt and shame. Instead, it is to live life to the fullest, leaving behind kindness and love for those left behind to remember the best parts of us.