(no subject)
Chapter 1
Type it in.
Bury each memory with a click, with a pulse.
Type it in then watch helplessly as it all evaporates into the irrelevant heap of garbage it is bound to become.
Type, click, backspace.
Watch the page turn back to white.
The catch to writing a book, he says to himself, is to focus on the small things, the small details. Things like the limp of his next-door neighbor, the staggering rhythm of the living room clock; those tiny tidbits, god’s small flights of imagination, can make it or break it all.
After all these years, it shouldn’t be this difficult to write. It shouldn’t make him sweat the way he did, his temples damp with perspiration, long wet pools at the small of his back. If anyone were to see him they’d swear he was at a gym, like any other plump schmuck working off the pounds caused by years of complacent vegetation. But he’s a writer. A failed writer; a sweaty one, even; but a writer nonetheless.
He tries to remember a time when a pen and paper, a screen and a keyboard, weren’t set in his lap. A time when living life was more important than recording it and writer’s block was nothing more than an abstract term for the noveau boheme - those moody kids that would indulge in pseudo-intellectual trends like Kierkegaard and ambiguous sexuality.
He tries to remember a time when there was nothing beyond now- the happening. When there was no impending future breathing furiously at the back of his neck, pushing him forward, dragging him down. Down and forward. What a paradox.
He knows how self-destructive it is, in the end, to steal life and force it on paper - to rape a moment of its immaculate eternity and place it behind the bars of syntax and grammar. But he is a slave to this; it is the single impulse that keeps him alive. It is what he does and does it best.
Type, click, backspace. Watch the page turn back to white.
No more for today. His fingers are callused and so is his soul.