I have a most preposterous and unpardonable confession to tender, in extenuation of that impediment which, for the sake of public decorum, I must designate no more than a ‘writer’s block’.

Of late, I find myself descending into a precarious languor, a chronic exhaustion that clings to the limbs most dreadfully. There are hours wherein I cannot compel my own hand to the most trifling of tasks, nor accomplish even the humble cleansing of my teeth—without an oppressive vertigo seizing me, as though some invisible abyss had opened beneath my feet, intent on drawing me into its sable depths and extinguishing the frail taper of my consciousness altogether. I reason with myself in hushed consolations. Perhaps it is but the tyranny of the wintry season. Perhaps some malady, subtle and unnamed, has stolen upon me unannounced. Perhaps the fault lies within my own disordered faculties. Or perhaps—and here my thoughts grow strange and weary—one cannot wholly estrange oneself from one’s cocoon. It may be that my destiny was never to emerge radiant and winged, or to indulge in the arrogant illusion of enlightening another with prose of substance—rather only to lie with folded arms in that silken chamber, too enfeebled to resist its quiet serenades. 

Yet these impromptu contemplations—though clothed in poetic raiment—afford no dispensation from the obligations that bind me. I am a daughter before I am a dreamer; a pupil before I am a creature of inward reverie; and, should fate be kind, I shall be an employee before I may ever lay claim to my own unencumbered self. I imagined that casting my sentiments in language adorned with theatrics does not absolve me of duty; my words, however artfully arranged, could never stand tall in the face of external expectation.

I am thus left to wonder whether I suffer from some private madness, or whether such existential affliction is the common inheritance of us all. 

I wrote curled in silence at a narrow café table, the only source of cloying warmth crawling up my neck and steaming at my throat until it seemed to linger with a stifling insistence, as though some unseen hand would throttle the breath from my breast. I hunched low over my mug, its pallid surface reflecting the pallor of my own distorted composure. The room remained in unnatural stillness, vacant save for a single gentleman of middle years lounging across, drinking from his very own identical white mug with a queer expression—curiously inscrutable. I must confess, most of these days there has appeared to me a singular quality in the countenance of every passer-by; a look at once censorious and indulgently superior, almost faintly edged with a layer of malicious mockery. Although I cannot, with certainty, denote whether this perception springs from reality or from the fevered projections of my own unsettled fancy—in the distempered lens through which I behold them.

It was, in truth, not a very ideal mode of passing a Saturday evening; to sit in solitary with a notepad clasped in hand, persuading myself that I was but safeguarding my own tranquillity. Much like the ministrations of a desperate nurse, who, fearing the havoc of a convulsing patient, injects an overdose of sedative in the vain hopes of disabling a writhing and destructive beast threatening harm. I then pondered—as well—the reason for the coffee shop’s desolation at such an hour. I figured even the most extreme devotees of coffee and café dwellers would not fancy spending a Saturday night alone in melancholy. They would be outdoors, surrendering themselves to some fleeting gaiety that, by morning’s light, would seem scarcely more substantial than a dream. Otherwise they would be gathered in domestic warmth, seated close to one another, exchanging mild pleasantries beneath the benign glow of familial affection. They would surely not, I reasoned, content themselves with an unnamed cup of tepid tea, nor endure the inconvenience of a coffee machine fallen into disrepair.

It soon dawned on me how horrible an idea it is to seek refuge in scribbling beneath the sharp glare of light and in such sterile coolness—with nothing and no one but my own thoughts plaguing and ploughing at me, urging me to succumb to their persistent harassment. At length I rose and stepped into the nocturnal streets. Winter met me without mercy, its breath keen and unsparing against my exposed skin. 

It was then that I recalled a certain fragment of verse, once read in passing and yet lodged with curious persistence in the recesses of my mind.

‘I wish I wrote the way I thought; obsessively, incessantly, with maddening hunger. I’d write myself into nervous breakdowns, manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing. And I’d write about you a lot more than I should.’

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