The paper stares at me with menacing whiteness that makes my stomach knot. I love paper when it is filled with my words - joyous thoughts dancing like sugar plum fairies in a small child’s dream. A paper filled with my intellectual sweat is warm and comforting.
I look again at the ugly staring blankness of the paper and scowl back at it. I close my eyes to its unrelenting bareness. Putting my head down on the desk I smell the malodorous smell of spotlessness, feel the bitter coldness of the empty space. Lifting my head I look for a paper already filled with my erudite musings. To fill the vacuousness of my head with thoughts once thought and feelings imagined and recorded.
Searching for elusive inspiration, I come across some brightly coloured paper with my daughter’s childish scrawl in one corner. It says simply “grace”. My frantic search stops with one eloquent word. I had forgotten the grace of the paper. I stopped seeing it as benevolent friend and saw only the ugliness of foe. The paper- it isn’t my enemy. My own feelings of inadequacy are to blame for my creative dehydration and wild imaginings.
Looking again at the beautiful pristine paper and I feel the words bubbling to the surface fighting for life. A deluge of enthralling words cascades across the paper and my creative drought is at an end.
I write therefore I am.
Beutiful.
But shouldn’t it be the black laptop screen now?
Pratyush
March 10th, 2006
Yes you’re right it should be. I have the hardest time writing on paper. I can’t write as fast as I think but I do type 50 words a minute.
But computer paper isn’t as graceful as real paper.
Our little secret! Shhh…..
A.L. Harper
March 10th, 2006