The White Page

Earlier today, she bought herself a new notebook.

It was black and leather-bound, the sort a real writer would fill with interesting and progressive thoughts. The pages were thicker than standard notebooks, off-white, and made a satisfying hiss sliding against each other. With that, she also had a new pen. Black, thick ink flowed through it onto the fresh page like silk, leaving lines, not unlike those by a figure skater on ice. Sure, she was just writing her name, but the familiarity of the movement made her smile. She included the date.

The void of the first blank page was endless and looming. It was a familiar sight to her; the hardest part was always beginning, after all. She had countless times sat in this spot, staring at a blank page, battling her inner monologue. Too frequently she would give up, put everything away, and abandoned her story altogether. It was tempting to do that now. 

She didn’t want to be here, with this sense of longing for her stories to be told but unable to tell them. The words rattled around inside her head, a mixed-up, clangor, puzzle pieces that only she could put in order. The task seemed immense, too big for her to handle. The demons of doubt chattered in her ear, so convincingly trying to persuade her to take a break before she had even begun.

‘It’s not the right time’, they said.

‘When WILL be the right time’, she shot back.

There will always be something else to do, always some form of distraction.

She turned on her desk light and tried in vain to drown out the critic inside her. She focused harder on the page, straining her eyes against the light that bounced off of it that right now seemed blindingly bright. She was trying to see it for what it was; a simple piece of paper, but it may as well have been a concrete wall.

What to write about, she pondered. She flipped open the photo album in her mind, looking through the snapshots of her life. There was her 18^th birthday when she had been surrounded by family but wished for friends. A few years later, the gut-punch that folded her when her mother died. There was the guilt that shot through her like a lightning bolt when she remembered her first boyfriend, who’s heart she had shattered with reckless abandon. She counted up her many, many failures and tried to recall her small triumphs.

Exasperated, she decided to begin an exercise now, noticing that what she was doing was yet another distraction. Opening her old notebook, the cheap dollar store variety that high school students would be using, she turned to a page that was already half-filled with forgotten scribbles and thoughts from days prior, musings she had recorded and meant to use later whenever ‘inspiration’ came. She numbered the remaining free lines 1-13. Anything that came to mind that filled her with joy, she wrote on that page, creating a list of gratitude.

1)   That strawberry season was here, and the shelves at her local produce vendor were overflowing with delicious, shiny, red fruit.

2)   The rain that had showered her garden over the past few days had made her lettuce and dill explode from the earth.

3)   Her new notebook.

4)   The fact that she was finally clean.

5)   When she sat on her porch and could smell the salty air coming up off the nearby ocean, hidden behind the trees that lined her block.

She carried on until the ran out of space and thought about turning the page but glanced instead at the shiny new black notebook. It had been cast aside albeit neatly laid on the desk. It had been bought as a gift to herself as something to hold to mark her new life and to remind her that she was a writer. No matter what else she was, or had been, or would become, she would always be a writer. The writing was her gift, one she had neglected for so long as her life spiraled out of control into addiction.

When she recalled those dark days now it compared to a movie more than any kind of real life. Surely, she hadn’t woken up inside of boarded-up buildings or underneath bridges, groggy, confused, and dirty. It hadn’t been her that sat at street corners on gloomy days, huddled underneath a broken umbrella with a hat turned upside down at her feet, slowly collecting change and rainwater. It must have been someone else who claimed found belongings as their own, dumped them into a shopping cart and pushed them all uphill past well-dressed folks on hot days. And no way had she traded things that had once been of most value to her for a cloudy piece of rock.

This is what she told herself, what she earnestly wished to be true, but when she saw the track marks up and down her arms, when she painted her nails and saw them peeking from between her toes, boring holes through her like judgmental eyes, she remembered that yes, it had been no one else but her.

Writing was an old familiar friend, one that didn’t hold grudges and held no judgement. Writing was someone who had been waiting in wings while she destroyed herself piece by piece, always there, always waiting for her to come home, now welcoming her back with open arms.

The notebook seemed to speak, tell her that it was alright to hesitate, but not for too long. It told her it was not an enemy and that it wasn’t going anywhere. No matter what drivel spilled out of her when she put pen to paper, the notebook was going to drink it in.

Beginning again didn’t need to be this hard.

Why was she thinking about it so much?

What good did it do her to worry?

“I am a writer,” she said aloud, “and I am going to write.”

Then she picked up her pen and did just that.