Before the Watchmen, There Was a Poem
The Watchmen did not begin as these ‘grim reaper’ type creatures.
They began as an emotional rollercoaster.
One night, during one of the most difficult periods of my life, I paced through the living room of my new apartment while words began forming in my mind. I had recently gone through a painful breakup. I had moved into a new place, hoping it might mark the beginning of something better, but only six months later, my entire team was let go from the office where I worked.
After that, my life became a cycle of applications, interviews, and rejection.
I applied for position after position. I often made it to the interview stage, but nothing came from it. I did not interview well back then, even when I knew the work inside and out. Social anxiety has a way of making competence disappear like a fart in the wind. I would ramble nervously and over-answer questions. Thank god those days are over, I can laugh a little when I look back. At the time, however, there was nothing funny about it.
I had some savings, but not enough to survive for long. I certainly did not have enough to remain unemployed for another six months. I began selling and throwing away as many of my belongings as I can and limited it to only what I needed to survive.
Eventually, I stopped applying for management positions and began searching for almost anything that might keep me afloat. Two interviews turned out to be pyramid schemes. The legitimate jobs willing to hire me paid so little that even if I accepted one, I would still be facing homelessness within weeks. There is a special sort of exhaustion that comes from doing everything you are supposed to do and realizing it isn’t enough. You apply. You work. You sell what you own. You lower your expectations. You tell yourself that you only need one opportunity.
Still, the distance between you and disaster grows smaller. Living in a car while relying on a gym membership for showers and laundry is rough. At that point in my life, it was no longer an abstract possibility. It was real, really real, the kind you think all of your life ‘that won’t be me.’ I felt hopeless, isolated, and profoundly tired.
One night, the poem just came to me as I paced through the living room. I started imagining grim, ethereal creatures that existed silently. They watched humanity not realizing that it was taking its final breath. They weren’t there to save us, they weren’t responsible for what was happening.
They simply observed. Waiting quietly at the end of it all.
The Watchmen poem was influenced in part by T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men and by Rorschach’s opening monologue in Watchmen. Both carried a sense of moral decay, inevitability, and mental exhaustion that stayed with me. Their words seemed to understand: the fear that the world may already be ending in small, unnoticed ways.
From that feeling, the Watchmen in my novel, 14 began to take shape.
They were tall, hooded, and faceless. They watched from the edges of rooms and from places where the light did not seem to gather. Their presence alone carried the weight of something ancient and unavoidable.
Then another image came to my mind. I imagined a young woman who seemed to have everything going for her. She had a future, talent, intelligence, and the possibility of building a life for herself. Then, through what appears to be some random cosmic tragedy, that life begins to unravel.
She starts seeing beings no one else can see.
At first, she questions her memory. Then her perception. Eventually, she begins to question her sanity. That woman became Kate Townsend, the protagonist of my novel, 14.
As increasingly terrible events and visions begin wearing her down, Kate clings to the hope that someone else might understand what she is seeing. When she finally discovers another person who has witnessed the same impossible figures, she is given a brief sense of validation.
She is not imagining them. She is not alone.
Then another series of events threatens to tear that certainty away from her.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but Kate’s emotional journey became deeply connected to my own. As her world ripped apart at the seams, I understood her. I confided in her. I understood what it meant to feel as though each new day brought another loss, another disappointment, or another reason to stop believing things could improve.
During that very dark place of my life, I began questioning whether I had the strength to continue. I felt like a burden. I was exhausted and afraid, and I considered daily whether everyone else might be better off without me.
Kate’s journey toward that same edge came from the long internal trek I was making myself. I knew what it felt like to be tired of surviving. I knew how despair could distort reality and suddenly, you wake up one day and think, ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore.’
It’s difficult trying to explain that feeling to anyone who has never been there.
At my darkest point, during the darkest hour, the story began to blossom in my mind.
What started as a poem grew into characters, images, questions, and an entire world. Over the years, the story has changed and expanded. The Watchmen became more than the figures I had first imagined in my living room, and Kate became more than a reflection of who I was during that time.
The Watchmen represent what sits silently for all of us. Not necessarily death, and not necessarily evil. Just, watching; waiting.
The knowledge that everything can change through one decision, one loss, one accident, or one event far beyond our control. They embody the awareness that something is always waiting beyond the edge of what we can see, and that none of us truly knows what the next day will bring.
That is part of what makes them frightening. They don’t ‘come after’ us. They simply watch.
And perhaps the most unsettling thing about them is the possibility that they have always been there.
14 has been evolving for years, and I hope to release it by the end of summer. We will see where the writing and publishing process takes me, but I am excited to finally bring Kate, the Watchmen, and this world into the light.
It is strange to realize that something born during such a dark period of my life eventually became a story I deeply wanted to tell.
Before the Watchmen became part of a novel, they stood with me in that living room.
Silent.
Patient.
Waiting to be written.
— Rowan Alexander
If this story resonated with you, you can find more of my work — including updates on 14 — on my blog page, or my online store
