A short piece on writer’s block
The walls around me are as white as the page in front of me and as white as the sheet I’m seated on, until I shift on the sheet, “Oh sh*t, it’s now creased. Oh sh*t, it reeks.” Gas comes up like a kamehameha. Ahh, my nose! Those channeled fumes were released by my dietary choice of beans and eggs and rice. Of course, I can’t neglect the biology. My digestive tract broke that food into methane and hydrogen sulfide.
WRITE
I can’t write any of that. But I still have no clue what to write since it can’t be fiction. Too much about myself is self-indulgent, but I need something metaphysical conveyed in a true-life story. A classic ‘right’ gone ‘wrong’, or a ‘wrong’ made ‘right’. I close my eyes to look within. Listen. Introspect. Listen. Reflect. I can’t hear my inner voice beyond the outer noise of slamming doors, snorting busses and the stamping feet of hungry heathens. “No, they are not heathens,” I tell myself. Must not be so judgy. But the alliteration sounds good.
WRITE
I’m still staring at a blank page. It’s a grey day. Find the big ‘A’. A lesson…Achoo!
My trance is broken by a mighty sneeze. I sneeze repetitively into and onto white tissue paper like a songwriter. My nose scribbles through a hundred sheets. That’s the only thing I’ve managed to do. Write on tissue paper. “Oh, how creative my snot-hand is.” I lament. Those little boogers masterfully make origami … BEEP
“Screw you, you tosser car driver! I’m trying to build a parallel here with the tissues in a way that’s beautiful.”
I breathe out. My boogers. I listen intently to make sure the bus won’t interrupt me again. My boogers make superb origami swans, shoes and crumpled-up shirts. Sometimes in shades of gold and on hot days, rubies. I call them fortune cookies, for hidden within is a majestic gemstone. And their glow shows my health. But not today. They are as white as the blank page in front of me. “You know it’s breakfast”, my mind says. I should not
WRITE
on an empty stomach. But I can’t leave yet. My story lacks the big ‘A’. Too much showing and not enough telling. I contemplate a moral, a lesson:
“The events that transpired in this passage are all true. So too shall I say that the journey of every writer to bestseller is filled with vile distractions unmentioned in interviews, essays and journals. These include farting, judging, sneezing and eating. In fact, it is anything but writing, and when writing, it is like the knife against the flint. So the next time you pick the pen or browse the book, do not lie and say you just wrote a little or read a bit.”
ALL WRITE 😉
Samuel Rubadiri 