This was his second time of opening the document and just staring at the whiteness of the screen, at the little blinking line that waited for him to write something on the vast page.
His mind was as blank as the page he stared at, its emptiness reflected into his own mind.
No words would come, no ideas would form, he was nothing incapable of bringing himself to become something. To write himself into existence.
He forced himself to write something, to start an idea. Sometimes it worked, sometimes he would start jotting down disparate ideas and, somehow, like magic, they would fuse and would become a story or an article.
Other times, like now, he was so bogged down in his own self that he could not make sense of anything or string a story along.
He felt, at the same time, empty and compact, empty of ideas and meaning, compact like a big lump of coal that does not reflect light or being. He was in pain.
The pain of feeling stuck in yourself, unable to be who you want to be, who you desperately wish to be, who you need to be in order to fully live.
He took out his notebook and looked over ideas he had written down when out and about.
Snippets of images, of people, fragments of ideas that he had felt, then, would be worth developing into full blown stories.
None spoke to him.
He was not ready to give up.
Let me understand. Let me understand myself.
He tried to listen to himself.
Silence. Just the throbbing heart of frustration. The frustration that he could not do what he most wanted to do when he wanted to do it. To write himself into existence.
He glanced at the clock. Soon he will have to go to work and he will not be able to write anymore.
He felt a pang of jealousy for all those writers he had read about that could just sit down and write, just make things up easily. He was not like them. Oh, how he wished he was!
Why was it so difficult for him to do something he desperately wanted to do? It made no sense whatsoever!
One of the shelves in his small library was overflowing with Stephen King books. More disillusionment! He was way too old now to even write half of that! Time ticked by uncaring!
Why did he still want to write if he could not?
Because, when he did manage to write something, he was so happy, so pleased, like he had meaning. Like he was alive.
Time’s up!
He shut down his laptop and got up. With a heavy sigh he knew he will try again, again and again until there was no more time to try.
Maybe tomorrow …