The Writer

A half-moon looked in through the crack in the curtains where the yellow glow of lamplight rendered it redundant. A chaos of clothes and books spread across the floor; drawers gaped open spilling forth more clutter. The bed of heavy black iron sat in the middle of the small room, pillows and blankets draped over the bedhead and onto the floor around it, leaving the mattress empty: save for a young woman. 

Her mess of dark hair was pulled hastily out of her eyes into a knot on the top of her head, but long strands escaped to fall lose around her face. Clad in flannelette pyjamas and a single sock, she lounged over a notebook, the side of her hand stained in smudged ink, pen dancing across the page in an untidy scrawl. With dark circles beneath her tired eyes and a faint glow appearing on the horizon, little would stop her writing, save her falling asleep on the half-finished page or the desired sense of completion arising in the pit of her stomach. She endured. Keeping her eyes to focused on the page; forcing her hand to keep writing, though an ache was growing in her wrist; she wouldn’t let herself glance over at the clock on the side table that would tell her how little sleep she was going to receive. The night needed to be savoured.

She didn’t particularly want to be awake. The idea of falling back into pillows tempted her; enfolding herself in dreams was so inviting at such an early hour. She so longer to sleep, but she could not let herself want, she needed to write. Writing was not a want, writing, to her, was as necessary as breathing or eating. It had grown from a mere hobby to an addiction. Life was put on hold to feed her writing. It was these precious moments when words flowed effortlessly and seamlessly from mind to page. She wrote feverishly, not for pleasure, although enjoyment did linger, nor for lack of time, but in fear: fear that if she stopped, the words would too and she would be left with a mere memory of them in the morning. But her addiction prevailed over her tired mind, because this was the life of the writer, and she had to write.   

She was not a writer because of her habits but a writer because of her mind.  It was not that her passion had erupted and the urge for writing had overcome her, rather it was the way that she thought. She saw the world in already formed words. A constant narration played within her head describing to herself the world around her in great detail, as though she was trying to remember while she searched for pen and paper. 

You could not fix on the time or place the when she awoke to know that she was indeed a writer, for it was too long ago. She was in the middle before she knew what she had become and there was no changing that. There was some point when she realised that the tool which she had been equipped with for so many years was the tool that would save her. She just had to write. It was the release when nothing else was working, it gave her the ability to fly when reality grounded her; it allowed her mind to wander when she was stuck in the mundane; writing kept her sane.

The clock on the side table clicked over for another hour. The house around her was still filled with the sound of sleeping: a soft rumble of the fridge, the tick of the clock in the other room, the slight rattle of pipes through the walls. But outside, the world was starting to wake. The trickle of traffic grew into a consistent stream, birds began their morning discussions as early rises rose. And finally, the pen was laid down, eyes finally closed, and head dropped as the writer succumbed to the same need as everyone else and fell asleep.