On Writing
Blood on the Keys
The cold cackle of a windswept park in winter drifts in and out of earshot. In its sigh, an observer opens her laptop, howling and screaming her every whim, wrestling and wrangling words like bulls. The commas call.
She braces for this onslaught of idea — shoulders hunched, eyes ablaze in wonder — yet, still, nothing but a vanishing coo against the soft recesses of her cerebral cortex. Thoughts fail. Words stillborn.
A perfect sentence is a kiss. An elastic book, tantra. And, yet, the page lies blank, in wait, unfulfilled, the blinking pixels staring her down. “Use me,” they cry. “I’m yours.”
And she fell back, madly, while the sun crested over the trees in a way that made the shadows reach out and swallow her body. She does not move. She sighs. She lights a Camel.
There was to be no words today. No precious snippets from a life lived fully. No precocious pearls from a curious mind. Just the cacophonous discomfort of a free-range heart with no order to reign it in. No words. Only voices. Silenced only by their ineloquence.
The bulls roam free. The matador is off today, out wearing red in an empty stadium, craving the true bloodshed of art, each keystroke cutting ever closer, ever deeper. Perhaps tomorrow, the winds will calm. Until then, only the racing of her restless mind to play on repeat — there will be no music … only noise.
Oh, how deafening the silence.
