The Diary in the Attic (Part 5)

[Timl1980]

The Diary in the Attic

 

Part 5: The Last Days Begin

 

Sometimes the hardest battles aren’t in the past we read about, but in the present we’re forced to live.

 

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Anna sat in the recliner, the IV taped to her arm, the slow drip of medication sliding into her veins. The nurse smiled kindly, adjusting the blanket around her shoulders.

 

“Try to rest,” the nurse said.

Anna nodded, but her eyes stayed open. Rest was impossible. The diary’s words echoed in her mind...Emil mocked, Clara trembling, her ancestor writing, Jehovah is our refuge.

 

She closed her eyes and whispered the same words under her breath.

When the treatment ended, her mother helped her back to the car. Anna leaned her head against the window, watching the world blur past. People walking dogs, kids on bikes, a man carrying groceries. Life went on, ordinary and unshaken. But Anna felt the weight of history pressing down on her chest.

 

That evening, she sat at her desk, the diary closed beside her. She had finished it. The last entry was written more than a hundred years ago, but it felt like it had been written for her.

 

To those who come after us...stand firm. You will see the end more clearly than we.

 

She traced the faded initials on the cover. A.F. The same as hers.

The diary was done. But her story wasn’t.

 

Shouts drifted through her open window. Anna stood and peered out. Down on Main Street, a protest surged past...signs waving, voices chanting, police lights flashing.

Her phone buzzed. A text from a classmate lit the screen: “Come down! Everyone’s here. Don’t just sit at home.”

 

Anna’s stomach tightened. She thought of Emil refusing to fight, of Clara holding up The Finished Mystery with trembling hands. She thought of her own weakness, her body betraying her, and wondered if she had the strength to stand firm too.

 

The next day at school, the hallways buzzed with talk of the protest. Some kids bragged about being there, livestreaming the chants. Others mocked the police.

Then Daniel found her by her locker.

 

Daniel wasn’t just another boy at school. He carried his own scars...Crohn’s disease had made him an outsider too, and maybe that was why he noticed her. He never looked at her with pity, only recognition, as if her weakness mirrored his own. Anna had never told anyone how much that mattered, or how much she liked him. She was a servant of Jehovah, steady in her faith, but she was still a teenage girl...and Daniel’s quiet strength unsettled her in ways she didn’t dare admit.

 

He looked pale, dark circles under his eyes. “I almost went last night,” he admitted. “My mom wanted me to. But…I don’t know. It didn’t feel right, ya know?"

 

He hesitated, then asked, “Don’t you ever feel like you should be out there too? Doing something?”

 

Anna hugged her books to her chest. She thought of the diary, of her ancestor’s words. She shook her head. “Not that way. That’s not where the answer is.”

 

Daniel studied her, his expression soft. “You’re different, Anna. But…I think I get it.”

 

For a moment, she felt the pull...the comfort of someone who understood her pain, who didn’t treat her like she was fragile porcelain.

 

But she also felt the weight of the diary, like a hand on her shoulder.

That night, Anna lay in bed, the diary on her nightstand. She reached out and touched its cover.

 

She whispered into the dark: “We are still here. We are still standing.”

Outside, the protest chants echoed faintly through the night.

 

And Anna realized: the test was no longer in the pages of the diary. It was here. It was now.

[Dolce vita]

Thank you, Tim. The weight of a book—and it could be the Bible—against a weakness, any weakness, is a very nice meditative proposition.

As I follow Anna's contemporary life, I can't help but think of The Diary of Anne Frank. Are the initials in the main character's name a coincidence?

[Timl1980]

1 minute ago, Dolce vita said:

As I follow Anna's contemporary life, I can't help but think of The Diary of Anne Frank. Are the initials in the main character's name a coincidence?

 

First, thank you for reading it and commenting on it. I read the diary of Anne Frank in prison, and it was very very powerful. Honestly, it's entirely a coincidence, although you are now the second person to ask me that...the first being a sister in my own congregation! 

 

It wasn't intentional...but it may have been subconscious. I honestly don't know, this story just kind of popped into my head a while ago...and when the brother who shared the diary with me...that just cemented the idea and brought everything together.

 

I'm glad you liked it... because this one took a lot out of me emotionally to write...as you will see in the remaining parts!

[ChrisW]

Anna struggles not only with a physical battle but an emotional and spiritual.  Isn't that always the case? As though the one is not enough of a challenge. We all have a fight, the days of this system are closing. So we will continue to press forward.  Our legacy are the soldiers we read about, from Able onward.  

It's a beautiful story. 

Thank you. 

[Timl1980]

1 minute ago, ChrisW said:

Anna struggles not only with a physical battle but an emotional and spiritual.  Isn't that always the case? As though the one is not enough of a challenge. We all have a fight, the days of this system are closing. So we will continue to press forward.  Our legacy are the soldiers we read about, from Able onward.  

 

This right here...this is why I wanted to tell her story!

 

The two brothers I spoke to about her filled me in on some of her struggles...and a couple of her real life struggles were very similar to what Anna faces in my story. It's not enough that we are battling our own imperfections, our own daily "ability" to douse ourselves in metaphorical gasoline and strike a match to our own stupidity...no, we must fend off attacks from all sides while STILL remaining sane enough to simply continue to exist in Satan's wicked system!!

 

Pills, prayers and holy spirit...that's all some of us have to cling to. The mere fact that Jehovah can sort through everything going on in our life and still manage to find SOMETHING good about us...it's utterly amazing to me. 

 

Thank you for reading and commenting...the story gets more heart wrenching from here on, that's all I will say.

[ChrisW]

8 minutes ago, Timl1980 said:

mere fact that Jehovah can sort through everything going on in our life and still manage to find SOMETHING good about us...it's utterly amazing to me

Amazing is the only way to describe our God. And yet he values us puny humans.  Does it not make us lift up our heads despite it all? 🙂

[Dolce vita]

What we can appreciate in the trial, despite everything, is its teaching: what does it tell us about Jehovah, about ourselves, about our strengths and weaknesses, about the meaning we give to life in general, to life with Jehovah, to life without Jehovah. We learn, we meditate and then, I hope, we make resolutions: to humble ourselves, to repair the damage if there is reason to be, to never go astray again. Now we understand. And if the trial is an illness or old age, it is the error of Adam and Eve that we will reflect on, and we will never want to hurt Jehovah by blaming him for what happens to us. On the contrary, we will thank him for this difficult to define love that he has shown us, and we will want to spend eternity saying thank you, even if we know that eternity will never be enough.

[dljbsp]

That ending hit like a soft hammer — quiet, but you feel it deep. You managed to drag history through the attic dust and drop it right into the fluorescent hum of a hospital room, and somehow it still breathed. Anna’s weakness didn’t wilt her — it refined her, like fire under thin glass. And that last line… it doesn’t end the story, it leaves it standing — just like she does.