100 Days of Pages, Page 1: The Muse

The page was blank, as it had been for some time. In fact, James couldn't remember when he had last been moved to touch pen to paper. Not years, certainly - it couldn't have been that long, could it?  Life always seemed to be getting in the way, and who had time to write when there were bills to pay, the children to take care of, errands to run, and, if he had to be entirely honest, shows to catch up on and mimosas to sip over a light brunch with Ashley. Finding time, he always told himself, was the problem, as though time were a six year-old with a penchant for unknown closets and hard-to-see corners underneath the bed.

But then, a tiny voice whispered, you never really looked very hard, did you?

At some point over the years, he'd moved his writing desk - he'd had a desk specific for writing back then - to an unobtrusive corner of his attic. They'd needed the space, he had reasoned, and with the children growing up it was getting harder to justify a corner devoted to writing. Really, he could write anywhere, and if he truly needed the silence and the space to focus it was hardly a trek to find that piece of the attic.

In time, however, the urge to climb upstairs faded, and even the memory of the desk vanished into a blur of sports teams and groceries and PTA meetings and late-night television. Promises to himself to jot down a few little notes - an inspired sentence here, a novel phrase there - went habitually broken. The short story was never finished, the novel frozen in outlines and drafts of outlines. Somewhere in the back of his mind still floated spectres of lost explorers and private investigators, the ramshackle skeletons of cosmic abominations and dead gods, but they scattered at the harsh glare of responsibility. Climbing into the attic might as well have been scaling Everest, for all the preparation and will required. Then they'd needed to move other furniture upstairs as well, and the writing desk receded further and further into the shadows.

James ran his hand across the desk's smooth cherry finish. Dusty, but hard and smooth, with no sign of fungal invasion or gnawing insects. Despite its neglect, the desk had preserved itself well in its years of storage, as though it always knew that one day, it would be needed again.

He had been afraid, if he really had to put a finger on it. Not at first, but as weeks and months drew on, as attempts to fit words together began to feel like assembling a jigsaw puzzle in the dark, it crept in on sly, wispy tendrils. It was the fear that the next time he touched a pen to the page, the words would abandon him. That he would look into his soul, pushing open the door that once led to wonder, and find nothing but a wasteland of ash and embers.

If that's so, the voice whispered again, what makes you think you'll find it now?

The children had grown up, moved on, moved out, and now wrestled with children of their own. Ashley had moved on as well, to a place he couldn't follow. Her absence left an emptiness so vast and deep he felt like a man floating in the open sea, with nothing but miles of black water and slithering monsters between him and the ocean floor. Simply being home was a treacherous reef of jagged memories, so he took to walking. Walking everywhere, walking anywhere, with no destination, as though by simply putting distance between himself and home he could eventually walk away from the cold ache cramping his guts and the iron band around his lungs.

At some point, on one of his walks, he began fitting words together, in an order he was sure he had never used before.

"The need for absence is not an absence of need."

It meant nothing. It was a single candle on a mountaintop at night, flickering against the slightest breeze. But it reminded him of a time when he dreamed of storms of butterflies, of rainbow-colored sunlight on distant worlds, and of ships made of frozen quicksilver and spun glass that soared through kaleidoscope skies. Ashley had loved his writing, hadn't she? Ashley had fallen in love with him for his writing. How had he forgotten that?

James sat down at the desk and picked up his pen. Words. The words were still there, somewhere. He could still put them together - his walk had shown him as much - but what had been so effortless unbidden felt clumsy and awkward when he went in search of it.

You abandoned it, the voice whispered, sibilant, insidious. You will never find it again.

Hush now, said Ashley's voice, as clearly as if she stood beside him. She sounded amused, gently chiding, the way she did when he insisted he would never be a proper cook or learn how to swing dance.

Your words aren't some well that runs dry, she said, or a mine that goes empty. Your words are the wind and the rain and the sun in the sky. They will come back every time they disappear. And if ever you feel like you can't find them, just remember that somewhere in the world the wind is blowing, rain is falling from the sky, and the sun is peering out from behind the clouds.

"I miss you," James whispered.

I am here. Ashley replied. I have always been here.

A spot of wetness bloomed on the page, forming a starburst of grays where it touched ink. James wrote, filling the ocean with words.

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Well this was weird. And self-referential. I wonder if I can ever operate from a place that's not buried with egocentric overtones. The story also started as something rather different, but one point of this exercise is not to go back and edit myself too much, so other than some cosmetic changes at the end for flow, I'm going to try to leave everything as a first draft.