This is my 2nd story in an ongoing and misguided challenge I’ve set out for myself to write 50 Stories in 50 Weeks.
I thought I could quietly slow-fade this wretched 50 Stories in 50 Weeks project out of my life without anyone noticing.
Then a few frustratingly supportive friends kindly asked me about my blog in passing, perhaps aware that was exactly the push I dreaded and needed.
Annoyed that I couldn’t even competently bury the half-alive corpse of my ambitions, I trudged back to my desk, a mental-health cookie in hand, where the remnants of my previous attempt (sweat, tears and profanity) awaited me. I opened up my laptop and wiped the screen clean with a new document too pure to sully with imperfection.
The slender caret blinked at the same rate as the hazard lights on a car. Underneath it lay a perfectly rectangular blanket of a million snowy pixels. Bedazzled by the brightness and whiteness of the document, I felt a dizzying vertigo, and I fell forward, barreling intentions-first into the abyss of the blank page.
It was a strange place, the Blank Page, seemingly the inverse of the universe. A light ether instead of dark, and the black strokes of word beginnings where shimmering stars seen in telescopes and dreams would ordinarily be. And though I did not have any instruments to corroborate this, I had a distinct feeling that time was not heating and expanding, but rather cooling and contracting.
Dazed from the fall and the infiniteness of white, I pulled myself up from the ground and began walking, tentatively, unsure of how the ground worked here and whether walking - something I thought I knew how to do - worked the same here as it did out there. There were no echoes from my footsteps, or sounds of any sort, except for that of my inner voice, which sounded louder and clearer than usual.
I descended a winding staircase into deeper blankness, the subterranean pressure of the hallowed stairwell and the contraction of time squeezing my head from the inside out. Every now and then, one of the inky, blotted stars boiled into a supernova, perhaps boring a tunnel into a baby Blank Page universe.
Along the walls, which soared into a world where words exist, hung massive art frames, each one staggered down and forward from the last. They were the kinds of frames found in palace halls, just as ornate, but they did not shimmer with the gold of riches, the silver of spoils, or the wood of of warmth. Rather they were the dull white of emptiness.
And these frames literally sat empty, with no art or mirrors within to fulfill them. Below the frames lay corresponding inscriptions, each letter in the plaque comically large, unabashed in their efforts to taunt me.
“Non-fiction”, read the one closest to me.
I took a few more steps down and glanced at the inscriptions belonging to the next empty frames.
“Fiction”, read the first, “Pulitzer”, the next.
Fuck.
Manic from this monochromatic nightmare, desperate to escape the mausoleum of the Blank Page, I frantically began to write.
Friends do not let friends quietly fade into the abyss :)