Ravens in the Writing Room
I’m no longer ahead of the curve. I don’t know if I’m on the curve at all, or if there’s such a thing as a curve. I crawl into bed unsatisfied and wake up with a strangle hold on the pillow. Every day it’s the same, an initial burst, followed by a ferocious decline. The morning shower is nourishment. I dance into my clothes. Breakfast and coffee, the birds fluffing their feathers and pecking at one another. Early in the day there’s still beauty.
I find the seat for writing. This goes well. The curser moves, sometimes with weight behind it, pushing it like a freight train. Other times it inches millimeter by millimeter, the way a single coffee mug can move a table overtime. That writing chair can be a soul sucker. When the page is full, the ego is thrilled, even if the words are nonsensical. The document is saved and closed. The text is stored somewhere, but for me, it vanishes. Maybe it vanishes for a day. Maybe it’s packed away as zeros and ones for eternity. There’s a file somewhere, in “the cloud” maybe, a mountain of crumpled paper. Practice pages that never got off the bench. The energy fades into unwillingness.
In the afternoon, there’s a battle between self-sabotage and limp desire. There’s more to be done. There’s always more to be done. That’s the recipe. The ingredients are available to most – work, plus time, times passion. After so many disappearing pages, passion comes at a cost. It’s syphoned away, pulled from the intestines like a handkerchief from a magician’s sleeve. The only way to refuel is to seek out the chaos. Drive into the storms, internally or externally. Risk destruction. The act of sleeping, alone, isn’t enough to recharge the batteries. Sometimes the batteries have to be charged by heartbreak, isolation, or tragedy.
By late afternoon, the birds mock me. Ravens perch in the tree branches, smirking into my window. Every afternoon, I promise to kill them. I’ve got a slingshot and old AAA batteries crusted with powdery white acid. Then again, maybe the ravens are right. Maybe they have a point. They’ve got different sensibilities. They smell the desperation. They know how low the needle has dropped. They’re curious as to how long I will survive the tormenting cycle. I think they make wagers with one another. I hear them squawking, rooting for the crash.
Dinner might as well be fed to me through a tube. By evening, I’m nearly comatose. I’ve hit the wall, an undefeated adversary. My nose is broken and twisted. My clothes shredded from the raven’s beaks. The saving grace is the night. It drives the bird away. They hang upside down like bats in black trench coats. They’re invisible in the trees, except for their eyes. Their eyes reflect the moon like broken promises at the bottom of a wishing well.
I close the blinds. I sit down to write. It’s all I can do to disremember the ravens. All night I try to write them into extinction. It’s futile. They’ll be waiting for me at sunrise.
