Who Knows

The blinking cursor mocks me mercilessly as I stare at the empty page. With every digitized blink, I wonder more and more if I have the power to move it across the white expanse, send it on a harrowing journey to the bottom of the page, make it disappear on a freshly printed document.

I do the busy work, providing a false sense of accomplishment. My name, the date, the header. They don’t really matter but make my idle hands feel useful for a moment, the worry welding up within me temporarily quelled.

My mind races about everything but the topic at hand. I run my hand over the spines of the books lining the shelf behind me. Dust stirs up in plumes at my touch. All of these words. They’ve all passed through my brain, have all influenced me somehow. I envy the names printed on the dust jackets. How I long to do what they’ve accomplished: they’ve written something somebody else wanted to read. Their cursors moved, their abilities proven; they found the secret ingredient so elusive to me. I hope I could absorb their abilities by proxy, but all I manage to do is sneeze.

In the movies, characters just go on some adventure where they find the inspiration they need to write the story that’s been lying dormant inside them all along. I go outside and walk down the street, hoping something miraculous will happen.

It’s a nice day, kind of sunny with a slight breeze. Pretty non-descript. The road is same as it always is with its faded white line marking the division between coming and going, the mailboxes patiently waiting to gobble up deliveries, the trees quietly standing guard over the silent houses. The familiarity erases any chance of inspiration. A cat eyes me suspiciously where the road dead ends. As I approach his territory, he backs up but never diverts his piercing green pupils. I stop to keep him from running, and we reach an impasse.

The only sounds are the birds chirping and us breathing, sounds so familiar they hardly count as sounds at all. The cat is looking at me like I’m the most interesting and frightening thing in the world. In that moment, his whole existence hinges on whether I am friend or foe. As my feline acquaintance contemplates flight or fright, I take a few steps forward. He arches his back in retaliation. “It’s okay, kitty,” I say in the baby voice people reserve for animals and infants.

Immediately, I regret it. Who am I to assume the cat should be regarded as a child? He and I treated the encounter with strikingly similar approaches. I would be offended if he meowed at me condescendingly. “Hello cat,” I replied, in a regular tone.

The cat remained frozen at the edge of his driveway, blocked by an invisible boundary, but unarched his back. I stood in the uncomfortable silence for a few more minutes before turning around to head back towards home. When I glanced back, the cat was gone. He certainly knew to cease his opportunity for escape.

Sitting back in front of my blindingly white computer screen, I rested my hands on the keys and waited. The stubborn story rests within me, arching its back, blocked by fear and boundary lines. With every step forward, it backs up. My approach is wrong. If I turn my back, it will disappear. But I coax it and coax it, and eventually, it has to come.