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lordragoon
The door slammed behind me. It had been a long day, but at least all my work had been finished. I stomped into the kitchen and pulled a can out of the fridge. The pop of a lid opening and the slow fizz of escaping gas reverberated as I opened the drink. I took a deep gulp and walked up to my computer. My hand tapped the I/O switch and my eyes watched as Windows booted up. The slow ticking sound of a fan and the almost acrid scent of dust flashed by my mind and were quickly ignored. A punch of the windows key and several clicks of the keyboard opened WordPad. I had never gotten used to using a mouse.
From the view of a psychologist, writing is just an escape, a way to run from the normal tension of life. That is why shrinks are paid the big bucks. They can take the smallest habit and make it sound like a full-blown psychosis. It had to be hard to discover such mental problems in everyone, at least once or twice.
The slow clicking of the keyboard echoed through the room, speeding up as I began to catch up to my thoughts. A word appeared... then a sentence... a paragraph... a page. My drink sat next to the keyboard, forgotten but for the occasional slow sips I took. The buzzing of the light bulb mingled with the clicking fan and the tapping keyboard. I ignored them. In fact, I didn't notice them.
For me, writing is not just an escape. It's a way to express emotion, but not just emotion. Sitting in front of a computer, I could pour my soul into the text. My hopes, my fears, my life, my dreams, my nightmares - all flowed into the mold of a computer screen. Writing let me show what I felt, more than that; it let me show what I dreamed.
I got to the midpoint of my work, the slow churning of words and meaning hitting a high tone. I tapped out a few more phrases. The work's tempo quickened; the drink was left to go flat.
I wrote because I had to. Writing gave me a vent. It let me put my emotions out to be seen. I couldn't show my feelings through voice or through art. I displayed it through my writing. But it wasn't always easy to stop.
My writing sped up. My computer, never fast, struggled to catch up. I wrote of a world of pain and of anger, of pain that wrote its own story, of a story that never ended, of an ending that no one wanted. I slammed out another paragraph and took a deep breath before I jumped into the next one.
Writing let me show emotion, but as the act of observing affects the observed, it also affects the observer. The world I drew up flooded past me. Characters existed in my mind. A work in progress is like a loose tooth. A player whose story was not finished became like a friend lost.
There were only a few more paragraphs to write. Then a few more paragraphs became a few more sentences. I typed another sentence and stopped.
The ending was the worst part. The sudden flood of emotions stopped just as suddenly as it began. Just as the start of a work was important, the end was even more so. For every 'best of times and worst of times,' there must be an end of times. For every life's start, there was a death. The end had to force the rest of the work into a single sentence and push it against the writer's theme. Without an end, a story is just a half-baked plot line. Without a finale, a poem is just a few rhymes. Without a death, a life seems just a series of random events, like a breath against cold glass; a flash of delicate patterns soon fading into nothing without leaving a single sign of its existence. The end had to be a true finish.
I read the rest of my work again, correcting errors and typos as I read. A few additions held the motif above the rest of the work. I got to the end and looked at the keys. A sip and ninety key clicks put the last sentence in its place. Another seventeen saved the file. Another glance back-
The world lay behind me, an entire universe of words and metaphors. The web that I wove sat there. I pulled a few strands and let go. Nothing broke. Good enough. Another story.
I shut the computer down and turned it off. The soda can sat to my side, almost empty. I drained the rest of it and threw it into the recycle bin.
Someday, other people would begin plucking at the web of a story I wrote. Some would like it, many wouldn't. Eventually it would be picked apart and applied to the great web, the only true one. It didn't matter to me. They read.
I turned on the TV and started watching cartoons, waiting for another day, another story.