Attention

She sits down at the computer. The screen with an empty page in front of her. She decides that this is it. Yes, it is late. She should be in bed now, but she decides to make an effort all the same, almost like it is now or never. All the excuses she could tell herself, that she needs to sleep, that she can do it tomorrow, that it doesn’t matter. They all disappear behind the thought that if she does it tomorrow it will be completely different than if she writes now. So she sits down in front of an empty page, determined not to let her doubts and excuses get in the way.

She is determined to not let fear get the best of her. If she had decided to go to a café the next day, it might never happen. So she trusts a try. She lets herself go just a little bit, because that is what she knows she has to do deep down inside, take the chance of writing horribly. Her head hurts for the self-inflicted insomnia. The night is to inviting to sleep away, she tells herself, but still all that she does it throw every chance of getting down to the real deal and she goes to bed tired and without being filled by the words that hide behind her eyes, that hide themselves in her mind and in her heart.

There is enough to write about, she thinks looking at the clock, seeing that only ten minutes have passed. And her first thought is to go to the sofa to smoke, to run away, thinking that she will not be able to just let the words flow out. The problem about computers, she thinks, is that the words can flow so much faster onto the screen than if she had done it longhand, and that means that it takes a shorter time to write about what she had already thought she could write. The plans she had made before sitting down, how she could write, and what would she do when all that is used up. She has no idea how to let go, to let the words come, because those she has no control over.

She wonders what it is about this control. What is it that she wants to control? She doesn’t even know that. She lets down her blonde hair, to perhaps lessen the pressure she feels in the top of her head. Her period is in the second day and the pain is less apparent, more like an uncomfortable feeling in her stomach. She pulls her hair a bit, frustrated about what comes next. She thinks about a comment she got about why she always kept her hair up in a ponytail. She doesn’t know. It is just comfortable to not have her hair in her face. Sometimes though, she has her hair down, but that is often because she wants to hide a bit, and hair flowing around her face does that for her. Hides her… Besides, with her hair down it gets tangled in the back and gets hard to comb through.

The minutes tick by so slowly. She is getting restless now. Completely terrified about running out of things to write. Her crosses her legs, tapping the foot on the floor, not to any beat, only to the restlessness in her. She wants to scream. She wants to have something to write about, and she knows she has sources for books. People around her, parts of their stories would fit nicely into a story, but always the stories slip from her, existing only in her mind where they unfold beautifully. But the moment she tries to catch them with words, they laugh at her and run away, and she doesn’t have the strength to chase after them, wondering if they are worth it. What if she feels forced into a story that doesn’t suit her? She is so scared of losing her dreams. So the safest thing is to watch them run away and turn the other way.

Everything around her is chaos. She is chaos. But from chaos there is always some kind of order in store. Storms are chaotic, but the sea is always calm after a storm. The grey won’t last forever. There will be sunshine again, or moonlight. Outside she knows the moon is growing into a full moon. She loves the moon and always greets it with enormous joy when she ventures out after dark. Today she walked to the store and walked towards it, though she was distracted by it being so cold, and she thought she would have to take on the warm fussy black coat next time she was going out. At least now that it is so cold. She coughs as if to remind herself that the cold can make her sick.

Half an hour has past by and she is sure that she cannot go on writing for another thirty minutes, it will be impossible. But she is determined to stick with the plan. She has to force herself to stay on the page. She sighs. It is hard. And her thoughts run ahead of her. Like they are trying to dictate what she should write, what is appropriate, because she has plans on posting this on a website and she has to be careful what she writes. Everything has to be nicely put together. Nothing too revealing, thank you. But what is the point, she thinks, of resisting the urge to write. She does it now. She wants to write, but doesn’t know how to go past the wall that she has built between herself and her longing and the creative world she feels every single day.

She wants to be confident enough, but she is too scared to even try. She doesn’t even know how. All of her words circle around the same thing over and over again. It isn’t that she lacks the courage to break through the wall. There is nothing she wants more. She thinks her low energy level comes from her not living truthfully. She knows there is a connection between not being happy and her health that she has felt getting worse and worse over the past year. Blaming it on smoking and not exercising would be easy, but she knows that there is a deeper level to it. Her energy would come back again when she felt she had a grasp on what was going to come next. That was not getting a job. That would be the natural step when she had climbed out of this dumb she had gotten stuck in.

It had taken her many years to get to this place. Where she actually managed to sit in front of the computer for one hour straight and just let the words come. Trying not to judge what came out, just letting it be. She still had difficulty in giving details about the physical world. But her inner life was filled with details that she could easily find and describe. She mastered that in a great way, it came natural to her and she wondered if that had something to do with her participation in the world outside her four walls. Not many days ago, she saw a woman walking past outside in the streets. At first she had looked like a child, but when she past she saw that it was a woman about forty if she should guess. She wore a poncho that reached all the way down to the ground, sweeping dramatically around her feet. The woman had no idea that she was watching her. She had no idea why exactly that woman had made her way through the wall and impelled her to remember her, but she thought if she didn’t write about this woman she would be forgotten and she didn’t want that, so she sat down and wrote about her. Not much, just a couple of lines about what she had seen.

Afterwards she thought that it was a new experience that gave her a little ray of hope, that maybe, just maybe, something was changing, that she was slowly opening up to see her own creativity a little different. Not as something she would want to engage herself in, but something that she possessed and had possessed since she was a little child. No she might not have written the stories down on paper, giving clear sign that she was a writer (since writers write down their stories), but the stories she made in her head was always entertaining. She was in her stories, she felt what she thought up. She was in the stories in her head, like she was in a movie. It was like that the past years she had tried to persuade herself from writing, from gaining access to this world that she knew was absolutely wonderful and very much a part of her, like it had been when she was a child.

She thought that it was incredible that could come if you only let go a little. Before this hour she had not believed that she could actually manage to do this, but right now she doesn’t care if it is bad or good writing. She just enjoys listening to music and hearing the tapping on the keys like a far away sound. Even the music comes a little in the background, because the black words flowing onto the page is more important. She tries to concentrate on their appearance than on what comes down, shifting her mind from thinking about what to write next makes the thought of the minutes ticking by slowly go away.

Her black and white cat jumps up on the chair she has besides her computer, for putting books down on, books she takes notes from. Books that she might want to take with her to London or whatever place she wants to stay for a longer time in the future, books that she can then put on a cd to take with her. She starts to think that this is boring. No one would be interested in her telling about taking notes from books. She is patient that way. Doing that would seem like a waste of time for others, but she learns a lot from repeating the words of others. She thinks that there might be an inspiration for an idea in those books, something that triggers her imagination, that triggers an idea or something else. So she keeps busy that way. And she is glad. If she didn’t read a little every day her days would be so much more boring. Her books are her comfort. The stories that can bring her out of her mind for a little while, or teach her something about herself.

Like the book that showed her finally what she had tried to figure out for a long, long time. That she was creatively blocked. That was why she couldn’t sit down and write for more than a minute or so. That was why she threw away everything she ever wrote, because it felt forced, untruthfully, but it still kept her longing for words intact, so she would not forget that this was her dream. She always tried over and over again. Even though it never got her anywhere, it keep her on the path of fulfilling her dreams of being a fulltime creative. She was pleased. She had taken a major step today. She was glad she had listened to that voice inside of her that told her to do it now. To sit down and write. To give details maybe not about the physical world, but at least she had left a rather detailed account about her inner world. That is after all a start, she thinks. And an hour had really past. She had done it. She could now go to bed and sleep in the knowledge that she had accomplished something, good or bad. She didn’t care.