I’m sitting looking at the screen. It’s blank, and it’s fucking killing me. I remember what it was like to be the writer I once was, where words would tumble from my brain faster than I could put them to paper or key. I want it back. That carefree, “look at it all filling the page” kind of writing that once consumed me. Daily writing that numbered in the thousands of words is now in the low hundreds at best, and I feel cheated. Wronged.

I bled words once. It was as if I could slit my wrist and pour a lexicon across the page that stole the tiniest part of my soul for the reader, inscribing with my own blood the very ideas I wished to convey. I gave them freely, knowing that even if I came out the other side a lesser person, the story was there. The sacrifice was well worth it.

Now the blood is just that: Blood, carrying letters instead of volumes. Gallons spill for the smallest of declarations. I bleed dry just to carry on meaningful dialogue.

How fucking weak I feel, reduced to spitting out everything I am for a meager paragraph. Drained of strength, I flop back and wait to regenerate enough to form another. Minutes have become hours and days. Still it gets no easier.

I look back and I can see me, sitting strong and proud in front of the monitor as words spewed from my veins and ran through the keys in crimson rivers. Cigarette in the corner of my mouth trailing smoke into my eyes, my twelfth cup of coffee cold beside the keyboard. Outside sounds blurring into a general susurration that is at once everything and nothing, meaningless noise and a constant stream of aural information. Fingers like blurs on the keys.

I want it back. I feel it, and it is just out of my reach. I can taste the air, thick with smoke and swirling with ideas that I seemingly plucked from the sky. It hovers there, just out of reach, and my heart screams to have it back.

Stolen in a moment of misery and pain, my muse cries and gnashes her teeth as she is separate from me.

Bring her back, I beg the universe. Capricious gods jeer and point, unwilling to grant even such a meager request. They are amused with my feeble attempts to be what once I was, and they hold her apart from me, letting a single tear drip through the veil now and again that I might never forget her.

I feel the brush of her fingers on my cheek, like ghostly reminders of the past, and I clutch at them for all I am worth, only to find them dispersing like smoke within my grasp. Why can I no longer feel her loving touch?

Why is my blood less than once it was?

Why am I unable to complete the simplest of fictions without the strongest of efforts?

How do I get her back?

She has my soul.

END