Typing opening lines, saving files, adding another wasted page to the piles of unfinished, half-scribbled poems and unfulfilled ideas. Every sentence seemed to have become just that: a punishment set, the structure of the letters serving no purpose other than to fence him in.
A lifetime had been spent building worlds with words. The lives led on the page had always been the easiest to manage, and the success of his fictions had allowed him to distance himself from the disaster that his unwritten autobiography had rapidly become.
The back-bedroom office he inhabited twelve hours a day existed as a manifestation of his cluttered mind. Accessed via a narrow passage, the walls of the tiny room were lined with paperbacks. A cocooning womb of comforting books. What once felt so safe now seemed to stifle, sitting at his desk, no longer the captain of the ship, just a stowaway on a sinking vessel.
Sipping his bitter drink, her face in the framed photo upon the shelf smiled at him from better days. That she had been written out of his life was a plot twist that he had failed to see coming, despite the cliché it so obviously was. Her only remnants: pictures on paper, images in his head, making her life the equal of the characters he spat out in stories. Now, even that simple pleasure had been robbed from him.
Spinning in his chair, the tears made their daily appearance, when his foot caught a teetering pile, sending it crashing. Revealed, at the bottom, was a long-forgotten notebook. Picking it up, he realised it was blank bar one simple inscription.
FOR YOU AND ALL YOUR WONDERFUL DREAMS.
Sighing, then smiling, he took a pen, then began to write.
He was tired of trying…