Blank
I don't know what to write.
There. I've said it. I stare at this computer for minutes and hours and days, hoping for inspiration, for feeling, for fucking anything to come from my fingers and appear on the screen. But nothing happens, and I am disappointed. I am always disappointed, because I know that somewhere inside of me there is an untapped reservoir of emotion and ugliness and beauty and perfect-flawed humanity waiting to spill itself, waiting to be heard, to be seen, to be released.
Waiting.
And I wonder why that is. Why am I always waiting? Why do I stare at the emptiness of pages and waste my time mourning their blankness when I could be filling them? What am I waiting for? There is no Muse, no beautiful goddess of inspiration to whisper passions in my heart, to awaken frenzy in fingers, so what? What do I sit here and hope to find in the blank white and the blinking cursor? What can they give me that I don't already have? What can they teach me? Emptiness is emptiness is blankness is nothing, and staring does not change that.
I wonder if I'm afraid, sometimes. I wonder if the thought of baring that cracked-pretty-ugly-flawed-whole-human center of myself is frightening. Because that's what writing is. It's taking the deepest parts of yourself and throwing them on a page for the world to see and judge. Writing is tearing open your chest and encouraging people to poke at your lungs, your heart, all the beating parts of you. Writing is standing on sky-scrapers and screaming secrets; it is Naming yourself in a world that prefers anonymity; it is stopping people on the street and demanding that they look. Here I am! This is the Truth of it! This is the Truth of Everything. And they accept it or they don't, they look or they don't, they listen or they don't, and I wonder if perhaps I am afraid of screaming my secrets and hearing only silence in return, of Naming myself only to find that anonymity was better after all.
But in my heart of hearts, I know that it's not any of these things that render me silent. It isn't any of those fears which seal my lips or still my fingers. No.
My real fear is tapping that reservoir and finding out that it was empty to begin with. There was no beauty after all.
So I stare at this computer for minuteshoursdays and wait for something to happen, wait for that place inside myself to give up something, anything, and pray all the while that it be anything but bare.
I don't know what to write. I didn't when I started this. I still don't. But I cannot fight the fear of nothingness with nothingness. I cannot fight blankness with blank pages.