Wasting Your Darlings | A Writer Story.

3am in the Universe. The microwave is beeping and my eyes are merging with my computer screen (way too bright).

Many writers identify their biggest fear as the “Blank Page”. My 2 cents: that’s bullshit.
I’ve never been so exalted in front of a blank canvas. A new story to tell, new characters to give occurrence to, with their walls and feelings and self-doubts and their scars and their pain. Their sorrows.

Writing horror is the funniest shit I have ever done, creatively speaking. Hands down. Sometimes I read my pieces aloud and laugh. Other times… Other times it is different.
Like right the fuck now.

I write those words and I feel them looking over my shoulder. Scrutinizing my every key tap. I am nowhere near the end of this story. I have yet to touch Eternity. My whisky is eyeing me next to the pad, luring fine. That’s a story for another time.

I’m on the clock. The more I re-plot and re-draft and re-write, proof-read and paraphrase, the more I feel them. The ghosts of the mind.

A door opens down the hall. The nice nurse lady just came home from her shift, probably to her little brown dog and deadbeat drunk of a husband. You attract what you fear, they say.

It exists, you know, in the worldwide folklore. An entity, or rather a kind of entity, called Egregore. It appears and is given strength by common belief. Like the case of Lucy, infamous spirit forever wandering through the halls of the Shining Hotel, it also is a general law among the paranormal community.
Many people think a place is haunted- therefore it is.

Isn’t it overwhelming? What the mind can achieve? If we go down that road, I mean.

The microwave is beeping. I should get up and take my bowl out, but nothing alarming.

This thought doesn’t come from nowhere. As a writer - tell me wrong -, my deepest desire, the epitome of my art, would be to literally give life. Life through thought, life through simple words, transcending, echoing through dozens, hundreds, an infinity of other minds - just like yours -, taken from their piece, thrown in discussions, at parties, colloques, leading to midnight internal monologues.

I hear yapping and glass shattering down the hall. The deadbeat drunk must have gone mad about the little brown dog. Some scars may be too tough to heal, even for the most talented of nurses. They announced rain tomorrow. She will be wearing sunglasses though.

3am in the Universe. My glass is empty and the prose gets funny. Another time’s story.

I always thought I could make it, as a writer, an artist. That I had gold in my mind, was such a bright kid. Scribbling full-ass novels on college ruling. Before the real job and the real life, and the naive hopes and the big lie. I thought I was strong enough, writing through the 9 to 5, the routine, the obligations and the bills, and my walls, and my feelings and self-doubts and my scars and my pain. I am nowhere near the end of my story, and yet so close, is luring me… Eternity.

The left-side neighbors start banging against the wall, it makes my desk shake. A Balkan middle-aged man and his rude-ass bitch of a wife. They heard the microwave beeping too. Weird smell coming out of it. I really should take a look.

There they are, the shadows at the corners of my eyes, the sense of pressure on my shoulders. As if the malign voice in my head took shape, right behind me, its crooked hands cold-locked on each side of my neck. “What if it’s pure shit? What if you never will be able to share what’s eating you inside out, devouring your mind?” And honestly they’re quite right.

My words mostly tend to be actual shit. Then the stories and characters I spent so much time building, they all wander in a sacred procession, crying in unisson: “Is that all we are worth?” And to be honest they’re not wrong either.

The Balkans have escaped from their modern-age hutch and have gone astray against my apartment door, impatiently banging and yelling. And I feel for them because I, too, maniacally hear the microwave beeping.

So I re-plot and re-draft and re-write, proof-read. No more paraphrasing. Bring in bigger conflicts, raising the stakes, un-doing the scars, deepening the wounds. I have written the same story a million different ways and still, it does not make them justice. I’m sorry, I tell them, I’m sorry you have not been birthed by another, more capable mind. One that could transcend you. I am sorry that, after all this time, you remain cloistered in the deep dark damps of my own mind.
And I implore your pardon.

Every time I am brought to my knees, alone at 3-something in the morning, I feel them all around me. Then come the sorrows and the guilt. The shame of not having done more for them. Every time I open a new document, I hold them in my arms like deadborn infants.

My door is shaking so feverishly, I honestly don’t know how much more it can take. And the bitch-ass wife she’s yapping too, behind the thin wooden door. They’ve been shaking the handle again and again, relentlessly until it dropped on the floor in a deafening sound.

Words that will remain unread. Characters who will never see the light of day, feel the love of a reader, nor the warmth of their bedroom shelves.

I grieve for them every night, only to realize they’ve been grieving with me, naïvely without a clue…

But not anymore, for now they are part of you too.

I get up from my chair and walk towards the kitchen- which is just a corner of my personal one-room hutch. The whole building is now bathing in absolute, religious silence.

I stop the timer, open the microwave door.

And oh, no- The horror!

For I let my soup bubble out for over an hour.

In my bowl now only remains

A burned, putrid left-over.

I told my aghast self-

What a fucking waste.