“Writing’s always a game played with ungraspable reality” -Bataille, Guilty
Upon waking up, I found my room disturbed by a mysterious intrusion. What they had done was so bizarre that any rational explanation escaped me. Nothing had been taken from me, instead a gift was left—oh how worse! On the desk, stood in all its mocking irony: a beautifully written piece. The curled letters on the page -this must be the work of an elegant writer- wrapped around the sophisticated ideas; sentences flowed beautifully, almost as if the eye reading them was being caressed.
It is important to communicate to the reader here, if there is one, that I took no drugs. I did not even drink. Except for coffee. I drank ungodly amounts of coffee everyday as if it was a magic potion that could slow down time. And it could: when my mind worked so fast, I could divide the day into little blocks to make it longer. The time between 1:30 and 2:00, that sweet half hour, became the space where I could crawl into, to have room for myself to do things. Just like a room of one’s own, one needs their own private half hour, you can’t blame me for this.
Caffeinated, I became a better version of myself working on faster gears. She could write. Once I reached those moments of absolute panic, the day before a deadline, she took over. The panic loosened everything in me, even my locked hands, and I let them do the work. My fingers could write better essays than my thinking mind could ever do. Great job! Nice writing! A+! Well said! The commentaries from my professors surrounded the graded work she produced. I wanted to be her, sometimes I thought I was her, but she always left me once I pressed send. Elusive as conjured ghosts are, she haunted me in her unattainability.
I remember the day I realized I couldn’t write. I was still a bright-eyed young student, at another school. This teacher was determined to reduce complex narratives to neat little categories of symbols, metaphors, and themes, instilling self-doubt in the young hands that held onto those pens. I had turned in an essay I thought was my best work, only to get it back marked all over with underlinings that cut deep. The colour of that red ink made me sick. That teacher soon quit the school and took his never-ending underlinings elsewhere, to torment other female students. And I quit my dreams of studying literature.
The break-in attempts continued for a few days. Each day a new essay, more carefully edited and beautifully written than the previous one, would appear on my desk, no matter how many times I would crumble up the paper and tear it to pieces. The sentences looked so familiar, the more familiar they sounded the more I read them, that I became surer that I could have never written it. It was too familiar to be something new; even if I had written it, I would have to be inspired by something else. It was too good to come from within.
Oh deadlines! How much I hated you, how much you made me want to do anything. If I had no deadline, I thought I could never live. How would I know when to wake up? In the morning, there was another essay on the desk. This was the fourth rendition of the same piece that had been haunting me for days. The sentences had been edited to almost perfection (because perfection was never possible when one could edit again and again), the thoughts were fully developed, the counter arguments completely considered. The smugness of it all. I got so angry that I got my matches to burn the paper. How dare they flaunt their beautiful writing in my face when I hadn’t even been able to hold a pen for days because my hands cramped so much? My fingers were sore with the anticipation of words I would never be able to write. They had written it all! As I watched the paper burn, the fire licking it all up, I felt myself cleansed with each burning word. Soon, there was nothing left of this stranger’s strange gift. But I wasn’t safe: in one final revenge, the flame jumped to my finger. Holding it under cold water I thought: perhaps this was what they wanted all along! to make me so mad that I would burn it so I would injure my finger and would never be able to write again. My arthritic fingers, burned upon contact, hurt too much to even imagine myself writing anything again.
***
Later that night, with my bandaged fingers, I touched the paper. Running my hands against the carvings on the page, I was faced with a sudden realization, a cruel joke. It was my handwriting. I could recognize it, and the ideas in it seemed vaguely familiar, like the scent of something I would want to, but could never write.
Gifts from me to me. How completely I erased myself through self-doubt. Insecurity made palimpsests out of each paper, but now I remembered. As I sat down to write, that dreadfully wonderful task, sentences appeared in my head fully written, so mysteriously, so effortlessly, so laboriously—like an essay left on a desk.
Editor’s Note: The writer of the short story published here claims that it just appeared on her desk one day. This is a work of fiction. Essays, ghosts, muses, inspirations, and edits, like names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents, are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or spectral, or to actual, literary, or imaginary events is purely coincidental.