Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Gift

Sometimes he wonders whether the gift is worth it.

Nights alone in his apartment, three thousand miles and three time zones away from home, staring at a blank computer screen, waiting for the words to come.

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time there was a story, a plot, an outline for a novel. Once upon a time there was a purpose to all this, the loneliness, the booze, the long hours spent in a daze in front of the computer turning out paragraph after paragraph to be torn apart the next day. Once upon a time he was still capable of putting word after word, the way a workman puts brick against brick, building something solid, something with a shape.

That was long ago.

Nowadays the best he can do is string phrases together, stray arrangements of words that drift across the page like clouds in a colorless sky. They mean nothing, these sentences of his, connect to nothing. They are unpublishable. They are a way of filling up the page.

But they are beautiful.

Sometimes he wonders whether it's a gift at all.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is it a gift? Yes. Is it worth it? - Worth what? It's all he's got and he needs to do what he can with it.

Anonymous said...

Time to take a trip back home or tie the knot :-)

a said...

@Anonymous-2 : Mom, is that you?

:-P

aadarsh said...

:) love the way you have put the block to words...oxymoronic in a way...the way u express ur inability to express...

Anonymous said...

attention spans are running short, strung words ought to wrk jst fine