Writer’s Block
I don’t know what to
say.
The words used to
flow out of me - no, they were pulled out of me. Like the endless stream
of the magician’s ribbon that he so cunningly unravels from his sleeve, I
choked on endless prose; sentences wrenched out of my heart through my throat
and vomited out in ink across miles and miles of paper.
Even now, it seems my
blood runs purple in excess, yet no matter how many times I split my veins I
cannot persuade the liquid to drip down to form lines of cursive. It clots,
thick, sticky, keeping my words trapped inside my body. I can feel them
pressing in the uncomfortable itch that refuses to leave my fingers, but no
matter how many ugly stripes I rip into my skin, there are only mere seconds to
attempt to squeeze out a turn of phrase before my body begins to sew itself
back together. No, I try pleading with it, don’t you understand that
the only way to be a writer is to be broken? But the cells of my being stay
resistantly silent - an answer would require words, after all.
And so here I am,
lost in the echoing quiet of a mind run dry. The ghosts are still here, in the
half-formed characters that wander through abandoned ruins that one day would
have been raised to sparkling palaces. Is it their presence that squeezes a
hand around my throat, the resentment at being promised a life told in
sprawling, decadent pages, before being left to rot in the recesses of my soul?
They should count themselves lucky. Only the ache of trauma in the name of
character development would have awaited them in those harsh spikes of script.
If I can’t persuade
my body to relinquish the secrets that prowl under my skin, then instead I must
rely on my brain to send signals to my fingers, to awkwardly pick up a pen and
try to scratch out strange symbols with artificial ink. But it is not made of me,
does not contain the fibres that sluggishly push life around my misshapen body.
How can I expect anyone to believe this, dishonest words upon dishonest paper.
After all, for all my talk of ink and paper, these words are nothing but a code
of ones and zeros locked inside a blinking computer screen. Writers are nothing
but glorified liars.
Perhaps I should just
face the truth. I don’t know how to write.
I wish I knew what to
say.