Candles and Typewriters

The room was gloomy, a single scented candle flickering at the desk casting a yellow glow.

The sky outside was even darker, not a single star to be seen beneath the pollution of the city, not even the moon making an appearance tonight. There was a lamp post in front of her house, although it was barely potent enough to shine through the street, much less to let the light into her house.

She didn’t mind. She liked the dark, her candle was more than enough. The vanilla scent was comforting and the yellow light was warm.

She was home alone tonight, as it had been the norm for years. She was past the days when being alone meant loneliness and hours spent with a heavy weight on her chest from it.

She had been young when she had gotten married, young when she had gotten divorced. Her children grew up and created lives for themselves, found their own families and moved out on their own. Being alone in her old age wasn’t terrible, it was the natural course of life, and she was happy with the way she had lived and how everything had turned out.

In the beginning, it had been hard, transitioning from rooms full of life and voices, to empty rooms and silence. It had been hard to move on from making enough food for five people to make food only for herself. It had taken a while to get used to it all, but she had done it.

Now, she had learned how to enjoy her time alone. She spent her mornings in the garden, tending to her flowers and the little patch of strawberries she had planted. Afternoons meant warm naps under the sunlight, either in the garden under the shade of a big tree or on the big couch in the living room. They meant books with yellow pages and old stories, hot fruity tea and baking cakes or bread.

Nights though, nights were her favourite part of the day. The dark atmosphere, the silence and the cold breeze. It all came together in a way that made her feel at ease. It was the time of the day when she felt more productive, more creative. The time she felt free enough to let her inspiration and passion flow in waves inside of her, become tangible and touch the world around her.

Nights were for her and her typewriter.

Writing had always been her passion. Something she kept with her ever since she had learned how to do it, a privilege not that many her age had had. She would never be able to thank her parents enough for providing her with the means to get the education that had aided her through all her life and that had made it possible to bring to life the ideas inside of her.

There was nothing she enjoyed more than to sit at her desk and let her fingers speak in ways her mouth would never be able to. Sometimes, it was hard to speak the words her mind longed to put out. However, when her mouth didn’t want to work, she could always count on her fingers to put them out into the world.

The words flew out of her when she was writing, much easier than when she was speaking. The words turned themselves into ink and stained the paper, bled black against the white as an open wound would. Worlds no one had ever heard of, people that had never existed materializing themselves on the page.

Her granddaughter had the habit of asking her to buy a computer, listing all the advantages from multiple fonts to multiple editor tools, lingering on the ability to delete words and rewrite them without any hassle and the wonders of spell-check programs. She was always adamant to say no, deny all her attempts and tries.

Her typewriter had been with her since she was a teenager, it had heard stories and knew about memories no one else had gotten a chance to; her typewriter kept more secrets than anyone could ever imagine. It tied her childhood to her adulthood to her old age, it was her most prized possession.

The solid weight of the familiar keys beneath her fingers, the ability to reach out and physically touch the words as they were printed on the paper, read them in an old fashioned way was something she would never trade for more sophisticated technology or modern-day solutions.

She flexed her fingers and settled them on the typewriter, ready to embrace the stories her being wanted to create. Her fingers flew across the keys, letters weaving together on the paper.

Writing was much like leading an orchestra. It took a certain sensitivity that she had acquired after years, the type that let her know if a sentence had the right beat or if it needed some mending. It took control to lead letters, commas and questions marks, control to weave together characters, places and times.

Much like an orchestra created beautiful symphonies when the instruments came together in the right way, words created stories when blended together properly. Every time she finished a story, she felt as if she were a conductor, at the front of a stage, in front of an applauding crowd, touching people with the words she created by touching a few keys on her typewriter.

Her characters were in the middle of a heated fight, harsh words and bitter tones. She was on the edge of her seat, her words coming together before she even had a chance to process them in her mind. She knew what would happen before it happened, she felt in control but as if she had no control over anything at all. She was leading, but her characters had a mind of their own and could tell their stories before she fully came up with them.

That was what she loved the most about writing, feeling everything interlacing together and turning into something beautiful. That was the reason she did what she did, the reason she wouldn’t stop writing until it was physically incapable of doing so. The reason she would never give up her typewriter, the one who had been with her through years of her life and endless stories.