The writer’s bloc arrived in him subtly, without notice.  He felt like he was accomplishing something, he was moving at a good pace in life (just a few weeks ago, the pages flew by) and now he was staring blankly at the world and at the blank page which was a metaphorical middle finger from all the great writers of the past, from his own upbringing and even from the near-empty book he was facing.

He had finished writing his first full-length book a few weeks ago, the same time when the slow drip of the scribe’s morphine began dripping.  But, I just finished my first book, he thought.  I have accomplished a lot, especially for myself.  Why can’t I just relax?

Problem was, in the society-satisfying cubicle in his mind, he was not a published writer.  He was not a professional writer, either.  His life consisted of traveling the world (or doing endless laps around either his neighborhood and the apartment du jour), carrying his black and white marble notebook and writing, dumping every thought and flaw and catchy line he could conjure into it.  Similar to a spider collecting nature in his elaborate web.  He wasn’t a writer by trade, he needed to write to keep a modicum of sanity in his brain; His pressure release valve.  The only thing he did and does, and without it, he just wanders, without purpose.

He knew it wasn’t really true, that these thoughts were just a more intense habit of self-loathing that he couldn’t rid himself of, something rooted deep from an entire childhood of…

Stop it…I cannot keep blaming…I have her blood, nothing more…she was insane, I am not.

I do not know what I am wanting to be, but “good enough” is simply giving up on trying to make anything of it at all…

Sometimes, a few words like this would come out, equivalent to the last remaining drops of bile in a dry heave.  He would get the painful spittle out, then just sit there, wait, staring into the pristine porcelain, waiting and waiting and waiting for more, waiting for either more of the anxious feeling inside of knowing that there are more heaves waiting or waiting for this painful feeling to finally end so that he could get up and exist through life a little more.  For now, though, he was stuck, swallowing hard, breathing hard, to neither unlock or temper, but move on from this paralysis.

“It’s too bright to type in the sun.  You mind if I sit here?  Do you have someone joining you?”

He couldn’t tell if he found her intriguing because of something he saw behind the pale skin and small, penetrating blue eyes or because he was recently singled and in a new place and was extremely ravenous for the company of a woman’s body.  Either way, he obliged to sharing his table.

She sat down, set up her computer and coffee and everything bagel with a pink-colored cream cheese and began working.  He sat there, as he had been doing, but now rather than staring at the empty seat across from him, he found himself staring at her, at her intensity, studying for the sake of observation and fascination every twitch, breath and movement she made.

Every once in a while, she would turn to look behind herself.  Is she waiting for someone or looking for another table?  He knew he was being too obvious with his glare but, if she did notice, which she had to by this point, she never let on to it.  She, in fact, continued on as if he wasn’t even there, either too self-absorbed in her world or politely ignoring the stranger in the paint covered shorts with a small coffee, a blue pen and a notebook staring at her.

After a while, the intrigue wore off and he went back to staring at the page, and those twenty-six words he was able to heave out onto it.

“Isn’t it interesting?”  He was broken out of his self-pitying meditation by her again, and noticed her watching two dogs off on the sidewalk not too far from them.  He must have been giving her puzzling looks because she repeated what she had said.

“Isn’t it interesting?”  She refused to move on from the question until he finally acknowledged her with some type of action more involved than a stare.

Finally…”The dogs?”

“How they interact when they meet each other.  Us, people, humans, we usually keep our distance, exchange looks and nuisances before we approach each other.  Dogs, though, when they first meet, they make immediate contact.  Nose to nose, sniff each other…They get close before they get skeptical and distance themselves.  Why do you think we fear each other so much?”

to be con’t…

 

 

af

 

 

(written with pen on paper)