My head is of the clouds. All seems futile. The mundane tasks of life seem senseless. I yearn for pen and paper and a moment to reflect. The written word ignites something within me: a whisper that beckons. It calls me to put down the tasks before me, to disregard my plans. As if I no longer have a say in my next move. There is no choice but to write. The form and the style are what matter. The words a mosaic, each finding a spot to nestle.
Unsettled. I continue on in necessities of the moment, yet no relief can be had until ink etches into page. Neither strokes of keys or taps against screen satisfy the gnawing. Anything else is mere placeholder. Work of other forms lands stale and arid; the pen a fountain where I come to drink.
Great stories I am not called to tell. Complex plots and adventure do not entice. They remain distraction, machinations that erect a fissure in reality.
A life I could easily spend in books, tales constructed so exquisitely as they wisp me to unknown experience. Passages ushering me into halls echoing with tragedy, hope, and emotional anguish. As suddenly I was enveloped in the transportive wisp, the bright rays of reality cut through. Pages that could never be infinite have closed and life is all that remains.
Life, life, the richness of life is what this pen scratches toward. Emaciated by empty feed of materiality. An ache for laughter, for embarrassment, for moments without pretense.
Why can’t the world just stop; give time to transcribe the swirl of thoughts onto page. Ever still the next moment calls. Dictates of life, relentless.
Scattered becomes the ashes of the flame that fueled the pen to write. The world comes into focus once again as if nothing ever changed. When will the pen burn incessantly again?
Changed, I have changed. The focus of my life melding and moulding me into something different. Time once spent obsessively among books and crafted prose has given way to repetition of life and work: creative in ways far from the page. Prodigy I am not. Once well versed, the faculty fades. Words are lost within a maze, never found when needed. What needs expression is known to me; known as pauses and stutters to others. Language escapes, too fine to be caught by the sieve. Lost, lost and turned around.
These words written, vulnerable: a healthy rain bleeds the ink and dissolves the page. How imperfect all things are. How imperfect we all are. How easy things wash away.
© 2026 Austin Lochan Dodd