Not writing and dying and dying and writing

by natprance

“How do you make a sense of ennui interesting?” he asks her. He is scowling at the keyboard of his computer and his fingernails are tapping his cup of coffee. The screen’s glow reflects in the frames of his glasses until he lifts his head and looks across the room. He sighs softly and he knows she didn’t hear him. He is irritated at her because she hasn’t heard him, and he is irritated with himself for being irritated. He wipes his eyes with his dirty fingers and takes a deep breath and smiles.

“Hey, hon?” he asks, a little louder than before. She looks up from her book with mild surprise and smiles back at him. He feels like an idiot for being mad. He hates himself for being angry when he knows that he shouldn’t be. He smiles and he almost feels like crying.

“How do you make a sense of ennui interesting?” he repeats. She thoughtfully tilts her head to the side and her ponytail rests softly on her shoulder. She presses her mouth to the right side of her face and looks up at the ceiling. She finally shakes her head gently.

“I don’t know,” she says with a look of loving concern, “I guess that by definition, ennui is boring, right?”

He slumps on the couch and runs his fingers through the thick, bristly beard that covers his face.

“I’m just…” he trails off as he exasperatedly looks for the right words, “I’m just trying to write something.” He slumps even further down on the couch as the words fall on his stomach. The page is an awful mess of words and phrases and verbs and sentences that he knows even his own mother wouldn’t want to read.

He closes his eyes and scratches his forehead. He narrates everything, and he doesn’t say anything. He writes about the way his cat runs back and forth through the hall chasing the shining red dot from the laser pointer. He writes about the curves of his lover’s body and how they excite him more than anyone ever has before. He writes about the beautiful trees that line his street and the wonderful nakedness of their branches in the winter. He writes about the heartbreak and loneliness that he has felt and is feeling. He writes about being depressed. He writes very frequently about being depressed. On his worst days he writes about suicide.

And he never says anything. His words are incredibly hollow and bounce helplessly around the pages. They can’t tell you how amazed he is by his cat. How peaceful and united he feels with his lover. He can never explain how the images of branches dancing together in their naked glory soothe him to sleep on the nights when he sleeps. He couldn’t tell you how much it hurts to be alone and how lonely he feels. He couldn’t express how depressed he is. He could try, but he would never be able to tell you how depressed he is. On his worst days, he would keep everything he wrote to himself. Because there is a deep fear inside of him that he doesn’t want read. He’s worried that it’s the only truth he understands and the only truth he could write about perfectly.

So he stops writing. For days or weeks he stops writing. Never months, never years, though some weeks are longer than others. He stops writing and he screams and he cries and he cuts himself mercilessly and tears at the skin on his back and pulls his nails from his toes and gnaws at his tongue and he peels the muscle and sinew from his legs and scrapes at his bones. The entire time he is not writing and every moment he is not writing he is dying. On some days he enjoys the pain itself and on other days he enjoys inflicting it upon himself. But he is always dying.

And once he has died enough, he knows that he can write and he can speak. He knows that to write and to speak, he must suffer. The only thing that inspires him is misery.

He writes about the boy who kicks the tin can down the sidewalk, and he says that that boy imagines himself in the tin can. That boy blames himself for his mother’s death, and that boy dreams that he can kick himself further and further down the street until he can kick his guilt away into the river.

He writes about the couple that lovingly hold hands while walking through the park and kiss each other on the nose when they stop under the old lamppost. He says that the woman is truly in love with the man, but that the man is only with the woman because he needs someone to love him. The woman knows this, but she truly loves that man and hopes that he will grow to love her. He never will, and she will hang herself when he falls in love with another woman. The man will not go to the funeral and will only think about her four more times in his life.

He writes about a woman who doesn’t exist. He writes about a woman who he looks up at from across the room as he scowls at his keyboard.

“How do you make a sense of ennui interesting?” he writes about asking her.

He writes that she walks over to him and kisses him softly on the cheek through his bristly beard.

“You look around it,” she says to him, pulling him off of the couch and out the door and making him feel like he could say to the whole world that he was happy. He would write and he would say that he was truly happy.