Ink Stained

Thin rays of sunlight pierced through masses of grey clouds, lighting Layla’s small bedroom in soft hues. An apology from the sky for an otherwise dreary winter day. Pearls of frozen rain still clung to her window pane, the crystalized droplets now shining bright as diamonds as the afternoon sun glistened weakly. 

Pinpricks of sunlight dotted across the lined writing paper Layla bent over. Spread across her well-worn laminate desk were crumbled notes and stacks of loose paper full of small, cramped handwriting. In places, ink from Layla’s ballpoint pens had smeared, leaving noticeable blemishes on the paper.

A knock on the bedroom door interrupted her train of thought. Jumping in her seat, eyes wide from the unexpected noise, Layla twisted in her chair. “Yes?” 

Creaking, her door opened and a tall figure appeared, half obscured by the dark hallway beyond. “Checking to see how it’s going,” the figure replied hesitantly, a rough cadence disguising a Midwestern accent. 

“Oh,” Layla relaxed, realizing it was only her roommate Tom. “Fine, fine. Everything’s going fine.” Perhaps she said the word one too many times to be taken seriously. 

“You need a drink or somethin’?” came Tom’s careful question. He knew, as everyone in Layla’s life did, that she despised nothing more than being interrupted while writing. Ruined her process. A scene brought about by dreams or sudden inspiration was a tricky creature to capture; if one wasn’t careful while putting ink to paper, the scene would balk, leaping away to be swallowed by the darkness of forgetfulness. 

Swallowing her irritation, Layla tried now to cast a net over her scene, trapping it in place. She could not afford to let those words vanish, never to be heard from again. 

“No, no,” she replied quickly, hoping to brush off any lingering concern Tom felt so she could dive back into her fictional world. “Have a water bottle,” she pointed a thin, ink-stained finger at the half-empty Wonder Woman adorned plastic bottle sitting on her desk. “All good.”

What she neglected to mention, and what Tom had likely figured, was that the ice cubes had long ago melted, turning the tap water room temperature. So what if she forgot to drink? Creative types often forgot to take care of themselves. Or do chores. Or sleep. It was entirely common. 

“If you’re sure…” Tom lingering still in the doorway, his hazel eyes darting from the unmade bed to the small, overflowing garbage can in the corner. Dust coated every surface and a stench of mothballs clogged the air. Tom knew if he looked closer, spiderwebs would be strung up on the ceiling. How Layla worked in such conditions, he had no clue.

“Thousand percent,” Layla distractedly said, her attention turning inward once more.

Realizing a lost cause when he saw one, Tom left without saying another word. Only the soft click of the door closing told Layla he had given up. Sighing in relief, she picked up her pen once more, scanning the page to remind herself where in the scene she was.

Ah, yes. The princess was about to reveal how she had outsmarted the wizard who had previously attempted to place her people under a devastating spell. 

***

A few hours later, Layla emerged from her writer’s fog. Stretching back into her chair, she turned her neck one way and then the other, slowly working out the kinks that had tightened her muscles. Bending over a desk for hours on end ruined posture, but she didn’t mind. 

What mattered was her story. 

Once, when Layla was eight years old, she had loudly proclaimed to her family that she was going to be a writer. Silence met her announcement. “Of course you will, sweetie,” her mother had finally replied, a smile pasted on her lips that did not reach her eyes. “Whatever you want to be, you can.” 

During the years that followed, Layla was determined to prove her skill. She entered writing competitions, submitting short stories about her pets performing acrobatic tricks on the swingset (climbing ladders and running down slides), wrote poems about her mother’s garden, tried her hand at a screenplay starring her Barbie doll collection. In some competitions, she placed well, but she never won.

 Judges told her the stories were ‘cute’ and that she ‘had promise’, but offered little feedback she could follow in order to improve. 

In college, she set a goal for herself. Write five hundred words per day. 

It was a New Year’s resolution, one she felt would be easy to keep. Emails, essays, and homework assignments would not count towards her goal. Only creative work counted.

Each year, inevitable roadblocks popped up. Common colds stuffed up her head; friends needed help moving; work at the coffee shop was too crazy. A day would pass where she didn’t write. Oh well, she decided, she’d make up for it tomorrow.

But one missed day somehow turned into two, into three, to a week. Soon, a whole month went by without her prescribed five hundred words coming to life on paper. “I’ll try again next year,” became her mantra. Pretty soon, no one took her goal seriously, least of all herself.

Just when she was ready to declare defeat, to acknowledge she would never make it as a professional writer, life threw her an unexpected bone: quarantine. 

2020 was a year packed full of surprises: some good, some bad, many of them sounding as if they came from a science-fiction novel. 

Exhausting all other activities within the first few weeks, Layla decided to turn off Netflix, put down her container of Chinese carry-out, and finally finish what she had started so long ago. 

***

Now, on the 31st of December, Layla scrambled to finish her New Year’s goal. Five hundred words had not been written three-hundred, sixty-five days this year, but she had managed to meet her personal writing goal more often than not during the days of city-wide lockdown.

“Just a little more,” she muttered. Aching, her wrist screamed in protest. Clenching a pen tightly in her hand for hours at a time required that Layla invest in compression gloves - these relieved the pain only enough for her to continue pushing through the agony of burning muscles. 

Old fashioned, Laya preferred pen and paper over typing on a laptop. One major disadvantage, however, was that plain lined paper did not come with a computer-generated word counter. 

Heaving a sigh, Layla gently placed her pen into an Avengers mug filled with writing utensils. The scene was finished. The princess had outwitted the wizard and saved the day. 

Scanning the pages, Layla quickly noted the red mark denoting where she had begun writing earlier that day. With patience borne of practice, she slowly counted the words, moving her finger from one blackened scrawl to the next. 

“Five-hundred and four,” she breathed in relief. Just over her count. 

A weight lifted from her chest. Standing, she shoved back her desk chair, toppling it over. With a whoop of excitement, she fist-pumped the air. 

“I did it!” No unmet goals could stand in her way now.