Untitled #2 or Writer’s Reverie
Steam from his mug radiated and mingled with the sensations. The warm coffee smell, swathing quiet murmurs, and the cozy aura of urns and pot and beans. Water condensed around the frames of windows, like dust from battle, as cold outside besieged the cafe.
He stared at the screen. His fingers tapped lightly across the keyboard, looking for that primal, campfire rhythm. A white document stared back. It was sparse, populated only by the blinking cursor that chipped at his ego and consciousness to reveal an empty well. Was it ever full? It must’ve been replete at one time, with zeal or desire or some inefficient propellant. His eyes flirted with the time and date, but the specter of a deadline materialized from the notification bar and chased his stare out the window. A kettle of vultures revolved some distance away and traveled slightly more westward with each revolution, leaving a scant few behind lost in reverie and endless loops while their peers moved ever onward.
The trance was broken by a young man bumping into the corner of his table. The stranger’s face was scrunched tight, adding to the effect of scarf and cap, giving him a boyish look that was tempered oddly with patchy stubble. He looked like a J, maybe Jonathan or Julien.
The young man said, “Oop!” and then, “I’m so sorry.”
The writer smiled and began to say “It’s okay” but was overtaken, this time consciously, by J who said:
“It’s a tight fit through here, huh.”
The writer said, “It is,” and smiled.
“Good thing you’re empty,” the young man said. “I might’ve ruined your work!” There was a smile, requited, and then J was gone.
Empty, the writer thought. For a second he wasn’t empty. For a second he was instead full of what-ifs and implications, a plurality of fantasies that simmered as if he had finally captured ambient heat. A world flourished and was extinguished. It was enough.
Those fleeting moments of sublimation were all he searched for; those small moments of infinite intimacy, wherein one lost themselves to their own being and were simply experiencing what was and what could be with no convention to keep them bound.
The achievement pales next to the remembrance of the dark night, those nights that consumed him psychically and left him bare naked before the severity of the world and the pervasive struggle. When he was small and the world was a gaping maw. It isn’t the success itself that brings fulfillment; it is the confirmation that those dark nights were necessary and that he had beat them. That is what made the journey worthwhile
His ring finger grew heavy and pressed down on a key. An “I” floated on the document. He deleted the letter.
The lost vultures finished their loops and rejoined the wake as they settled down upon a lost soul.
