Blocked

Nothing. That’s what he was getting. Nothing. The screen was mocking him. The room was hot. No, it was stifling. There was a difference. Everything was going wrong and it was a personal affront. The clock was loud- why was it so loud? An incessant ticking (just ticking and ticking and ticking- was keeping time really so necessary that the noise was required so constantly?) that interrupted his workspace. His silence. His peace. It cut through the heat. It cut through the nothing, the white space that he was drifting in. 

Everything was bothering him as he sat, hands on his laptop keys, waiting for something that wasn’t coming. His desk was messy. It had never bothered him before, but now it was suffocating. Why had he never bothered to clean it up? How had he lived like this? It was terrible. It was awful. It was distracting. That was the real issue. Pens and pencils found themselves flying, some making it into the pencil holders and mugs that were supposed to be their forever homes, some finding their way onto the floor and the cracks between the desk and the wall, a problem for later. The main goal was just that they would move. What even was this? What purpose did it serve? Some old paper? What scribbles were those? What did they say? He angrily shoved it in the waste paper basket and, after a few more minutes of frenzied, angry motion, sat down in a huff at the chair again. Did he feel better? No. Could he see the top of the desk for the first time in God knows how many months? That...was a question that he didn’t want to answer. 

There he was, just as he had been. The screen, same as it ever was, was watching him, just as it always had been. His hands itched to find those familiar places on the keyboard, the set spots that the teachers in middle school had taught him were the right places to use if you wanted to type efficiently and accurately. He knew that it would be a waste of time, though. It had been for days. He had been trying this for days. It had had the same result- hours wasted in pointless activity that benefited no one while the real work remained unfinished. He just needed that boost, that one idea that would fix it all. 

He had no long term solutions, but a short term solution was always caffeine. Besides, the walls were starting to close in on him, choke him. Was it just in his head or was the room smaller? No, it was definitely smaller. His eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. The desk was closer to the window than it had been yesterday. He knew the way that the room was laid out like the back of his hand. This was his office and he knew what it was supposed to look like and this was not it. That desk was definitely closer. Coffee could wait. This was important work that he was not doing and instead filling the void with. 

There should have been a measuring tape…  

Aha! Grasping hands found it in the back of the drawer. A surge of confidence ran through him. See? He knew this office like the back of his hand. This was further proof that this desk was not where it should have been. He looked back at the screen, blank as it was. It was black now, proof that he had taken too long on other projects that weren’t as important as what he should have been doing. Deadlines were a thing in the adult world. That was something that he had always forgotten about. Deadlines. What a terrible word. Dead lines. What did that even mean? Were the lines dead? How did they die? Who killed the lines? Why did they die? Did they deserve it? He passed the tape back and forth between his hands, forgetting all about why he had taken it out of the drawer in the first place. Those poor lines. What had happened to them? Why were they dead? 

The black screen was freaking him out. The screen shouldn’t have been black. He shouldn’t have been so irresponsible as to have let the screen go black. That was not something that should have happened. The measuring tape clanked loudly as it found its new home on the top of the desk. He shook the mousepad violently, listening to the old laptop try to revive itself. It was a grand old thing, like a majestic beast that was trying to heave itself about its enclosure in a local zoo for the entertainment of the screaming, pink rats that called themselves intelligent creatures. He knew that it was on its last legs. It made him sad to think about, though. That computer had been with him through so many things. Maybe it was time to send it to the farm upstate, though. It was time to upgrade. He didn’t want to think of it as upgrading, though. His old feller did everything that he needed it to do, it just did it much more slowly, and much… worse. Ok, so he needed a new computer then. He scribbled “new computer” on the pad of sticky notes next to the laptop before moving it away. It felt cruel to scheme about buying a new laptop right next to the old one that was still struggling so valiantly for him.

Having heaved itself back into existence, the laptop barfed up the blank, white screen that had so tormented him. What a visceral reaction it caused. It was the same gut feeling that comes upon seeing a rat (not one of those cute ones that lives in a cage as a pet, but a large, vicious, feral one that feasts on garbage and nightmares). He stared at it for a while, forgetting his kind, nostalgic feelings for the old hunk of machinery and instead simmering in self-loathing and rage. 

That was until the phone rang. He jumped like a little girl.

Receiving phone calls is like receiving the mail. You have to do it, but you don’t always have to like the calls that you get, like those spam calls or those garbage advertisement pamphlets that no one looks at but everyone gets in the mailbox all the time, always, forever and ever. This call, however, was from a friend (not even a friend so much as an acquaintance- someone who pretended to know him because they had talked thrice which was apparently not even to know that he hated being called). Why they called, he had no idea. People should have known not to call. He didn’t like it when people called. He didn’t like the tinny ring that phones gave voices. He didn’t like that he couldn’t see people’s faces when they talked ont he phone. He didn’t like people in general all that much. 

“How’s it going? What have you written today?” the voice on the other end of the phone asked. That subtle static. It bit into the side of his head like a fire alarm or a particularly screechy child. 

“Same as yesterday and pretty much every day before that,” he said, trying to keep the poison out of his voice. “You know how writer’s block goes. Just waiting on the next great idea.”